With China the primary source of quadcopters, the U.S. can counter with a superior domestic supply chain.

From its start in professional drone racing, Performance Drone Works (PDW) is now supplying special forces with quadcopters that can perform in hostile electronic warfare environments. We talk to PDW’s CEO and co-founder Ryan Gury about why a U.S.-based quadcopter market is essential for national security.

Breaking Defense: Tell us about Performance Drone Works.

Gury: Before forming PDW, I co-founded the Drone Racing League in New York. It was a venture-backed company, and we traveled the world hosting drone races that went live on NBC and ESPN. In doing that, we created novel technologies that didn’t exist in the drone industry before. First and foremost was a radio system that allowed a dozen concurrent links to travel multi-miles and never go down regardless of jamming, interference, or where we were in the world.

We also had a stack of high-performance quadcopters that were destroyed at every event, 600 or so, and we’d have to rebuild them in a day or two. These were consumable platforms that could take a beating and always perform.

Read More. . . https://breakingdefense.com/2024/05/sof-needs-multi-mission-quadcopters-for-the-contested-battlespace/