EP 84 — Ashish Parikh on Building Mesh Radios That Frequency-Hop Faster Than Jammers Can Track

Doodle Labs engineered multi-band radios that frequency-hop in milliseconds, outpacing jamming attacks that make satellite control impossible for real-time drone operations. When conflict in Ukraine started, the engineering team repurposed this architecture for anti-jamming by hopping between bands faster than adversaries could track and jam.

Ashish Parikh, Co-CEO, details their monthly software release cadence driven by field engineers embedded with Ukrainian operators, where mission requirements emerged directly from combat: silent-mode mesh networking for operators who become targets the moment they emit RF, listen-only modes for monitoring video feeds without signature exposure, and coordinating multiple drones plus ground users while one expeditionary asset pushes 100+ kilometers into heavily jammed territory. Their modular architecture layers like Lego blocks that combine for complex mission profiles.

Topics discussed:

• Repurposing multi-band capability from Army requirements into millisecond frequency-hopping anti-jamming during Ukraine conflict
• Monthly software releases driven by field engineers embedded with Ukrainian operators testing under active electronic warfare
• Building modular architecture layering sense anti-jamming algorithms, mesh optimization, and silent modes for coordination at 100km+ range
• Designing point-to-point mesh networks for 20-100km missions requiring sub-100ms latency where satellite infrastructure adds prohibitive delay
• Maintaining NDAA-compliant supply chains with Singapore and US manufacturing capacity scaling to millions of units at commercial pricing
• Deploying listen-only modes and RF signature management so ground operators monitor feeds without becoming targetable network nodes

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