Sourcing non-Chinese drone datalinks and radios from Taiwan

A drone needs two kinds of radio link, and they are different sourcing problems.

The control link — the command-and-control (C2) channel — carries pilot commands out and aircraft telemetry back. It moves little data, but if it fails, the aircraft is lost. In FPV and one-way-attack (OWA) platforms, the dominant control-link technology is ExpressLRS (ELRS), an open-source radio protocol — whereas Group 1/2 ISR platforms overwhelmingly run proprietary MANET/mesh radios (Silvus, Doodle Labs, Persistent Systems, Mobilicom), which is what tends to appear on the Blue UAS Framework. The protocol is open; the hardware that runs it is not evenly distributed. The overwhelming majority of commercially available ELRS modules are manufactured by companies based in China (RadioMaster, HappyModel, BetaFPV, iFlight) — a sourcing problem sitting inside the single most safety-critical component on the aircraft. And it runs deeper than final assembly: even a module built outside China typically runs an Espressif ESP32 — a Shanghai-designed SoC — paired with a Semtech transceiver, so "assembled outside China" and "no Chinese content in the bill of materials" are not the same claim.

The data link carries the payload — live video, sensor feeds, mission data. Here the questions are bandwidth, range, latency, and increasingly whether the link survives a contested electromagnetic environment. One of the clearest lessons of recent conflicts is that uncrewed systems are lost to electronic warfare at least as often as to kinetic fire: RUSI has estimated Ukraine may be losing on the order of 10,000 drones a month, the majority to jamming — with a large share of FPV losses attributed to electronic warfare, some of it to friendly emitters. Jam resistance, frequency agility, and encryption have moved from premium features to baseline requirements.

Datalinks and radios sit in the category regulation watches most closely.

NDAA §848 of the FY2020 U.S. National Defense Authorization Act names radios and data links among the critical components restricted when they come from a covered foreign country — or an entity domiciled there — for U.S. defense procurement. This is why the origin of the communications stack is often a threshold question for U.S.-facing programs, not a nice-to-have.

The Drone Dominance Program (DDP) is a specific ~$1.1B Other Transaction Authority program run by the Department of Defense's Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), focused on one-way-attack small UAS; its rules bind vendors in that program, not defense procurement at large. Those requirements escalate on a published timeline through 2026 and 2027 — later phases reach into where communications firmware is hosted and controlled, and require designated components to be sourced from the U.S. or allied, non-covered countries. Taiwan is an allied source that qualifies — a reason to source here, not only a constraint. If you are sourcing for DDP or a program modeled on it, specifying that up front changes which manufacturers can realistically serve you.

Blue UAS. Components, including radios and datalinks, can be listed on the Blue UAS Framework, distinct from the platform-level Cleared List. A listing attaches to a specific product and part number, not to a manufacturer as a whole.

One distinction worth keeping straight: "NDAA-compliant" and "no Chinese content in the bill of materials" are different claims. NDAA §848 covers a defined set of critical components; it does not reach every part of a radio. If your requirement is a genuinely non-Chinese supply chain rather than only NDAA coverage, that is a stricter specification — tell us, because it materially narrows the field.