Sentrycs · DroneShield · Dedrone · Anduril Lattice · 14 weeks
The 14-week path to engineering roles in counter-drone systems. RF detection, radar, optical, decision systems, and the soft-kill / hard-kill mitigation layer. A defense niche with strong job growth and concentrated employer demand.
How the spectrum works and how radars see drones.
GNU Radio + an SDR (HackRF, USRP). The hands-on entry point.
You need to be able to look at a spectrum waterfall and identify what you're seeing.
Pulse vs CW, Doppler, range equation, RCS.
Skolnik is the standard text. You don't need to design a radar, just speak the language.
Jamming, spoofing, low-probability-of-intercept comms.
Even on the detection side, knowing what attackers can do helps you build resilient systems.
RF fingerprinting, radar, acoustic, EO/IR.
How Sentrycs / DroneShield identify drones by their RF emissions.
The defense-tech niche. Public papers + IEEE Xplore have the surveys.
Microphone arrays + ML classifiers for drone rotor signatures.
Cheap, short-range, complementary to RF and radar.
Visual + thermal detection of small UAS. Computer-vision-flavored.
Shares much with the perception roadmap, applied to the C-UAS use case.
Why small UAS are hard to detect on radar; why phased arrays change that.
IAI Drone Guard, Echodyne, FortemDS — read their published material.
Soft-kill (jamming, spoofing), hard-kill (kinetic, directed energy).
How DroneShield DroneGun works. The legal context matters.
In the US, only certain agencies can jam in many contexts. Know who can do what before you build for them.
Nets, projectiles, microwave, lasers.
Anduril Roadrunner, Epirus Leonidas, RTX HELWS. Each has public material to read.
C2, sensor fusion, vendor ecosystem.
Anduril Lattice as the reference. How sensors, decisions, and effects integrate.
Read Anduril's public Lattice content end-to-end.
Who sells what, who integrates with whom. Map the landscape.
MissionRobo's /companies + /intelligence pages are the fastest way to understand the C-UAS market.