Member Spotlight: Syncopated Engineering

July 30, 2026

Syncopated Engineering is a drone communications and sensing payload company building NDAA-compliant components manufactured in the USA. The company’s products are being certified through the independent Green UAS program, giving customers greater confidence in the security and provenance of their systems.

Value of Syncopated Engineering’s AUVSI Membership

Syncopated Engineering values AUVSI membership for the access it provides to a broad ecosystem of drone platform vendors and technology partners, enabling collaboration that brings innovative products to market faster.

Jim Costabile, Founder and CEO, Syncopated Engineering, says that as a small company, Syncopated leans on AUVSI to help ensure its challenges and concerns are heard within the industry. AUVSI’s advocacy and impact, he says, help facilitate a safer and more secure drone community, creating greater opportunities for the industry.

Exciting Industry Developments

Syncopated Engineering points to swarming technology as an area of rapid innovation, enabling collaborative sensing and long-range communication across multiple platforms.

According to Costabile, collaborative drone swarms enable remote area monitoring and improved search and rescue, providing the ability to quickly reach areas that were previously unattainable. Syncopated’s sensing and communication payloads are built to support these collaborative swarms.

“We look forward to working with the AUVSI ecosystem to integrate our technology to make swarming both safer and more effective,” Costabile says.

Industry Challenges

Syncopated Engineering identifies the development of NDAA-compliant systems as the biggest challenge facing the U.S. drone market. Costabile notes that this shift requires a rapid solution, but involves a number of intertwined hardware and software components that must be decoupled, a significant development effort. The U.S. drone market, he says, must work together to meet this challenge while keeping drone components and solutions cost-effective.

Syncopated’s approach centers on open standard protocols to ensure rapid integration that is decoupled from the common non-NDAA, ESP-based hardware and software ecosystem. To develop its NDAA-compliant Radio Control Transmitter and Receiver components, the company built its own software repository of ELRS/MAVLink code supporting NDAA-compliant microcontrollers. Costabile describes this as a costly initial investment, but one that allows Syncopated to deliver the features and performance the community needs while still supporting the Ground Control Station and Flight Control software the community depends on. The company continues to maintain this repository to keep pace with the latest releases while maintaining positive control over the codebase, resulting in a more secure software baseline and the ability to layer in additional security features as customers require.

Syncopated has also leveraged open standards to add Wi-Fi to its Radio Control products, including support for MAVLink messages over Wi-Fi, avoiding proprietary protocols that would otherwise force non-NDAA-compliant solutions. The company’s software solution replaces the common, commercial, but non-NDAA-compliant ESP-based hardware, software, and ELRS/MAVLink “Tx Backpack” protocols with an NDAA-compliant, standards-based protocol that can be rapidly integrated and extended by the sUAS developer community.

Syncopated Engineering’s Role in the Industry’s Future

Conspicuity has become a dominant topic of discussion across the industry, with a range of standards and regulations aimed at ensuring safe airspace and compliance with new requirements. Current solutions, including Remote ID and ADS-B, each satisfy the needs of a specific category of user, and implementing both comes with its own challenges.

Syncopated Engineering recently presented a paper on these challenges at the 2026 AUVSI XPONENTIAL conference in Detroit. Costabile says the solution space needs to address the differing information needs of the community, law enforcement, and government, all while preserving pilot privacy, protecting military aircraft, and avoiding overburdening manufacturers with additional radio components that raise costs and reduce flight time.

Syncopated is developing a range of Remote ID and ADS-B software-radio payloads designed to enable better airspace management and give the public visibility into drones in their area, while preserving pilot privacy through Session ID. By building on standard protocols like MAVLink, the company can support tailored information flows while minimizing the number of additional radio components required.

AUVSI Experiences

Easy access to drones is driving demand for better counter-UAS detection and recognition that is just as cost-effective to deploy as the drones themselves. Syncopated Engineering is developing a low-cost, distributed, acoustic and RF CUAS portable solution for public safety, law enforcement, and mobile teams, an insight the company gained through its engagement with AUVSI events and conferences. These solutions are designed to work collaboratively with more exquisite CUAS systems, extending range and providing an early warning capability.