Echodyne Lands $490M Air Force Counter-Drone Deal as Ukraine’s Cheap Acoustics Spawn North American Rivals

The radar that can spot a quadcopter the size of a dinner plate at five kilometers is now wired into a $490 million U.S. Air Force counter-drone program. Echodyne, the Kirkland, Washington company behind the laptop-sized EchoShield radar, confirmed in April that its hardware sits at the center of Trust Automation‘s Small-Unmanned Air Defense System, the platform built to deliver on a contract that runs through August 2030.

That deal is the expensive end of the counter-drone market. At the other end, a four-person startup founded by University of Toronto undergraduates is blasting inaudible ultrasound at hidden drones and making them squeak. The gap between those two approaches is the whole story of how the West is scrambling to close the blind spot that small drones have torn open over air bases, prisons, and front lines.

I have been tracking the cheap end of this fight on DroneXL since February 2024, when Ukraine first wired its fields with microphones to hear incoming Shaheds. What started as a battlefield improvisation is now a commercial product category, and the contrast with Echodyne’s nine-figure defense contract tells you exactly where the money and the risk both sit.

Small Drones Broke the Sensors Built for Missiles

Legacy air-defense radar was designed to catch manned aircraft and missiles, so it filters out small, slow, low-altitude objects as bird clutter. That design choice is now a liability. Drones cost a few hundred dollars, fly under the floor of most sensors, and have hit targets from Israeli armor to runways in mainland America and Britain.

The fix splits into two camps. One redesigns radar to see the targets it used to ignore. The other abandons radar entirely and listens for the buzz. Both showed up in a recent Economist survey of the field, and both have a longer paper trail on DroneXL than that single article suggests.

Radar still has the obvious advantages. It works at night and in bad weather, and it sees anything in the air. The problem has always been that “anything” included pigeons, and the filters that removed the pigeons also removed the FPV drones. Echodyne’s pitch is that it solved the discrimination problem without the cost of a full military array.

Echodyne Built a Cheaper Radar That Watches for Spinning Rotors

EchoShield uses a small number of emitters paired with specialized antennas rather than the dense solid-state arrays that drive up the cost of conventional military radar. CEO Eben Frankenberg has said the system targets “smaller, slower, lower” threats through three tricks: cheaper emitters, rapidly shifting pulse waveforms, and a machine-learning classifier.

The waveform shifting is the clever part. The radar changes the length, intensity, and frequency of its pulses as the beam sweeps, switching modes for open sky versus cluttered building edges. Some waveforms are tuned specifically to catch spinning rotor blades, which is one of the few reliable ways to tell a drone from a bird. The classifier then sorts tracks against learned patterns: birds, balloons, quadcopters, fixed-wing. The result is a device the size of a laptop that detects, tracks, and classifies tiny drones out to roughly five kilometers, accurate enough to cue a camera or a weapon onto a moving target.

Echodyne is not new to DroneXL readers. The company partnered with BRINC in 2024 to feed radar data into drone-as-first-responder operations, a setup we covered when the two firms announced it, and its EchoFlight unit was built into the AiRanger for beyond-visual-line-of-sight detect-and-avoid work. The same MESA radar architecture now does double duty: keeping civilian drones safe in shared airspace, and helping the military shoot hostile ones down.

The $490 Million Contract Puts EchoShield Inside Air Force Base Defense

The U.S. Air Force awarded Trust Automation an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $490 million for counter-drone research, development, and production. The award was a sole-source acquisition, with the Air Force Research Laboratory obligating $20.3 million under the first task order and work running at Trust’s San Luis Obispo facility through August 20, 2030.

Echodyne confirmed on April 20, 2026 that EchoShield is a primary radar inside Trust Automation’s Small-Unmanned Air Defense System, or SUADS, which comes in three flavors: a rapidly deployable version on standard pallets for transport by military aircraft, a fixed-site version for permanent base defense with 360-degree coverage, and an expeditionary version sized for checked-baggage transport. All three meet the Sensor Open Systems Architecture standard, and Echodyne says EchoShield is the first fully integrated SOSA radar in the platform. Trust Automation CEO Ty Safreno said integrating the radar lets operators “identify threats sooner and respond with greater confidence.”

One detail worth getting right: the Pentagon dates the award to August 2025, but Trust Automation did not publicly announce it until December 17, 2025, which is why most coverage of the contract ran in January 2026. The Echodyne radar selection came months after that. The contract is the frame; the radar is the picture inside it.

This was not Echodyne’s only counter-drone win. In December 2025 the company was selected by Zone 5 Technologies for its Paladin interceptor drone, which Zone 5 says is the first such interceptor added to the Pentagon’s Blue UAS Cleared List. The radar that started in BVLOS safety cases is now standard equipment across an emerging American counter-drone stack.

Ultrasound Turns a Hidden Drone Into a Tiny Speaker

The acoustic camp does something radar cannot: it finds drones that are switched off and hidden. Prandtl Dynamics, a Toronto startup, built a system called Dome that fires pulses of inaudible ultrasound at a suspect area. The pulses make a concealed drone’s electronic and mechanical assemblies vibrate, producing telltale squeaks, while a mobile phone’s different components stay silent.

Prandtl boss Parth Mahendru describes the goal as turning a hidden drone into “a tiny speaker broadcasting its position.” The company says Dome has found drones in a backpack, behind a rooftop ledge, and inside a vehicle, though so far only stationary drones a few tens of meters away. Chief technologist Joe Dai says a battery-powered handheld unit branded Dome-C, meant to be wielded like a bug-hunting device, should reach market this summer. A larger tripod-mounted version, Dome-O, floods a wider swath of sky and works alongside microphone arrays like those deployed in Ukraine. Prandtl’s own 16-microphone array, called Oscura, tracks incoming drones as light as 250 grams (8.8 ounces) out to about 200 meters (656 feet), and Mahendru says Dome-O extends that range by roughly 75 meters (246 feet). The Illinois firm OTTO Engineering, which supplies communications gear to defense and intelligence agencies including the Secret Service, plans to partner on production.

Here is the part the Economist framing gets fuzzy, and it matters. Prandtl did not start as a detection company. The team of four U of T engineering students, Mahendru, Anna Poletaeva, Asad Ishaq, and Michael Acquaviva, built their first device from car speakers with $17,000 of their own money, and the original pitch was disruption: ultrasonic beams that destabilize a flying drone’s navigation and force it down. The squeak-detection trick is a newer application of the same physics. That is a company finding a second use for its hardware, not the founding thesis. Worth flagging when you read a clean narrative about acoustic detection.

Prandtl earned its credibility at Canada’s Counter-UAS Sandbox, a Department of National Defence competition at Suffield in Alberta, where it tied for second against aerospace heavyweights including Boeing and won a prize reported at C$375,000 (about $270,000). The team tracked drones amid construction noise even when the targets were out of view. The Canadian officer running the trials called the kit promising but not yet military-ready, citing false positives and the system’s relative fragility. That honest assessment is the right note. The physics works in a demo. The battlefield is a different animal.

Ukraine Wrote the Playbook DroneXL Has Tracked for Two Years

Acoustic detection is a Ukrainian invention, born of necessity and cost. Fields and forests across the country are dotted with microphones that listen for the buzz of Russian drones, feeding alerts to air defenses and drone-hunting teams armed with anti-aircraft guns. DroneXL first reported on that network in February 2024, when the U.S. Air Force’s top officer in Europe was already pointing to it as a model for affordable defense.

The model spread fast. Lithuania moved to deploy the Ukrainian-developed Sky Fortress acoustic system after Shahed-type drones strayed in from Belarus. Belarus itself unveiled an acoustic detector called Scanner 2.1 in May, pitched squarely at the fiber-optic FPV drones that defy radio-frequency monitoring. And in Boise, a U.S. startup called Talon Avionics has built a system that hunts FPV drones using sound alone, pairing acoustic detection with a 100-tube interceptor launcher. Ukraine made the cheap approach credible. Everyone else is now commercializing it.

DroneXL’s Take

Watch the through-line in our own archive, because it is the clearest signal of where this goes. February 2024: Ukraine straps microphones to fence posts. July 2025: a NATO member adopts the Ukrainian system. April 2026: an Idaho company sells the idea back to the Pentagon. May 2026: even Belarus ships a version. The acoustic approach traveled from battlefield hack to commercial product in roughly two years, and Prandtl’s summer launch of a handheld Dome-C is the next step in that same arc, a counter-drone capability cheap enough to carry in one hand.

The two camps are not really competitors, and that is the part most coverage misses. Echodyne’s five-kilometer radar and Prandtl’s tens-of-meters ultrasound solve different problems. Radar gives you standoff detection of a drone in flight, accurate enough to point a gun. Acoustics give you something radar physically cannot: the ability to find a switched-off drone hidden in a backpack before it ever launches. A serious base defense buys both. The $490 million flowing to Trust Automation and Echodyne is for the flying-threat problem. The hidden-threat problem is still mostly unsolved, and it is wide open for whichever startup gets a rugged, low-false-positive product to market first.

The honest question the demos have not answered is durability under fire. The Canadian Army’s own verdict on Prandtl was “promising, not ready,” and Ukraine’s combat-proven interceptor programs took years of iteration to reach reliable kill rates. A squeak in a quiet test range is not a track in an electronic-warfare environment with weather and a dozen simultaneous threats. The U.S. interest in Ukrainian counter-drone tech reported this spring, after the Iran attacks, will push these systems toward real procurement fast. Whether the acoustic startups can survive that jump from demo to deployment, the way Echodyne survived the jump from BVLOS safety case to a nine-figure Air Force contract, is the thing I will be watching. The blind spot is closing. The question is who closes it, and at what price.

Sources: The Economist, Business Wire, Trust Automation, U.S. Department of Defense, The Varsity.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.