22 In conversation | Christian Ramsey “That was the genesis of our Mode 5 transponder products for defence UAVs, which bloomed around 2020-2021 and was different in that we were honing something that customers explicitly needed, rather than what we felt – with confidence – they needed. “And today, we’re tying things nicely back to my Harris days of making systems for airports, by focusing on developing ground support infrastructure for DAA, like our FlightLine ground-based network and our SkyLine C2 network.” Hands-on approach Across all technologies, reducing SWaP and maximising certifiability remain the core target and challenge for uAvionix’s engineers. “Sometimes, they’re at odds with one another. You’re always looking for new, super-small chips, connectors, power amplifiers and so on, but you’re not guaranteed to find a source that’ll enable you to ship it into an ITAR product, for example,” Ramsey explains. “So, sometimes, we’ll build something that’s super small and lightweight, but can’t ever really be certified, like our new Trakr wearable alert device. But for mission-critical avionics like our C2 and DAA systems, it’s naturally more important that we keep evolving them with certifiability at the forefront, while still miniaturising as much as possible. “All other things being equal, integrators choose what’s smaller; every aircraft where we’ve been chosen over our competitors, it was on the basis of SWaP.” The single biggest barrier to miniaturisation in uAvionix’s transponders is the output power components (the core ADS-B chips themselves are already very small and flat); hence, allowances for lowerpower broadcasting in UAV integrations are of great help to its engineers. “And on top of that sort of thing, we’re always tinkering. Paul Beard’s capacity for certifying things came from his history in Silicon Valley, dealing with the actual silicon industry there – so his experience goes back to miniaturising things like new Bluetooth chipsets while adhering to strict standards,” Ramsey recounts. “That was his mindset when he came into uAvionix and started defining the technical and engineering culture. His expectations, and the standards he set for making electronics smaller, went so much further than any of ours did at the time. We’d still been aiming for things like the so-called ‘mini’ transponders you get from aerospace primes, even though those are still bigger than shoeboxes.” The actual process of certification consists broadly of two major activities. One is documentation – of every component, tool and process utilised in the course of producing a new system. “The other is painful, dogged, sometimes tedious engineering work. There are courses you can take in how to certify a product to DO-178, DO-254 and the like, but those who’d been trained to certify things the traditional aerospace way couldn’t always make the mental switch needed to engineer things down to the size of a coin,” Ramsey recounts. “There was one funny moment where we asked the FAA: ‘How do we certify this drone transponder?’ They shrugged. So, we presented the exact same device and asked: ‘How do we certify this GA transponder?’ To which they enthusiastically gave detailed and specific to-do lists for us to follow. A lot of reframing of mental paradigms had to click in our brains before progress for UAV certifiability came.” Following that, component experimentations were key to uAvionix finding certification pathways, such as using a u-blox chipset for its GNSSs (including certifying that chipset, instead of making a whole new GNSS chipset from scratch, as would be conventional). August/September 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Ramsey and uAvionix anticipate groundbased C-band infrastructure to play a hefty role in the fully integrated future of the sky
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