Echodyne’s drone-hunting radar gets easier to use in the field

Echodyne, a radar manufacturer based in Kirkland, Washington, announced Thursday it has built a plugin that lets its MESA radar systems plug directly into ATAK, the Android Team Awareness Kit software that has become the default shared map and situational awareness tool across much of the U.S. military and a growing list of public safety agencies.

ATAK itself is a free, government-developed mapping application that displays the positions of friendly forces, threats and points of interest on a shared digital map, letting everyone looking at their own device see the same real-time picture of what’s happening around them. According to the U.S. Army TAK Product Center, the broader TAK ecosystem now supports 15 Department of War programs and more than 250,000 users spanning military units, federal and state agencies, local first responders and partner nations abroad, making it one of the most widely adopted situational awareness platforms in government use today.

Echodyne’s new plugin means operators no longer need a separate dedicated interface to control or view data from the company’s radars, since both the radar feed and the system controls now show up directly inside the same ATAK map screen troops and first responders already rely on for everything else.

The radar hardware behind this integration is where Echodyne has built its reputation. The company’s MESA radars, short for metamaterials electronically scanned array, use a fundamentally different antenna design than traditional military radar systems, replacing the bulky phase shifters found in conventional electronically scanned arrays with a simpler architecture that steers the radar beam by switching individual cells on and off rather than physically adjusting each one’s timing. That approach lets Echodyne build radar units that are dramatically smaller, lighter and cheaper than legacy systems while still tracking small, fast-moving threats like drones, a capability that has made the company’s radars a common building block inside counter-drone systems used by defense, public safety, border security and critical infrastructure customers around the world. Where a traditional military-grade phased array radar can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and weigh enough to require dedicated vehicles or fixed installations, Echodyne has built versions of its palm-sized MESA radars priced under $50,000 apiece, a cost structure that matters enormously when the threat those radars are meant to counter, cheap commercial and military drones, keeps getting more numerous and harder to justify spending traditional high-end radar budgets against.

Eben Frankenberg, CEO of Echodyne, framed the ATAK integration as a direct response to how his customers already operate rather than a feature built in isolation.

“Many of our customers rely on TAK to support mission planning and operational decision-making. By integrating MESA radar capabilities into the TAK ecosystem, we are providing users with direct access to high-quality radar data within an interface they already know and trust,” Frankenberg said. “This release reflects our continued investment in interoperability and our commitment to supporting the operational requirements of defense and public safety customers.”

A radar that delivers perfect detection data is far less useful in practice if operators have to abandon their existing workflow and stare at a separate proprietary screen to see it, especially in fast-moving counter-drone scenarios where every second spent switching between interfaces is a second an operator isn’t tracking an actual threat. By building directly into ATAK rather than requiring a standalone control system, Echodyne is betting that lowering the operational friction of adopting its radars will matter as much to customers as the radar hardware’s underlying performance.