The CET Brief

Modern drones don't need to trust GPS, and they don't need to broadcast their intentions. They can spoof coordinates, hop between multiple links, and go dark whenever it suits them. For years, counter-drone detection assumed emitters would play by the rules. R2 Wireless was built on the realization that they won't.

In this episode of The CET Brief, David Yahid sits down with Onn Fenig, CEO of R2 Wireless, to talk about ODIN, the company's passive RF sensing platform for detecting, classifying, and geolocating wireless emitters without ever transmitting a signal. Founded by Dr. Yiftach Richter after his work in SIGINT exposed the limits of brute-force drone detection, R2 Wireless has grown into a dual-use platform tested across Israel's borders, NATO exercises, and multiple U.S. Army units, with a fully owned subsidiary now operating out of Austin, Texas.

Onn walks through why passive sensing matters in GPS-denied and electronically contested environments, how ODIN extends beyond drone detection to catch IMSI catchers, tactical radios, and satellite comms, and why the electromagnetic spectrum is becoming the next high ground in modern conflict.

In this episode:

• R2 Wireless's mission: a dual-use platform for passive RF detection, wireless threat detection, and geolocation across military, homeland security, and infrastructure use cases
• Dr. Yiftach Richter's SIGINT background and the consulting work that exposed the limits of brute-force drone detection
• Why GPS dependence breaks down in real conflict, and the case for detection that doesn't trust what an emitter claims
• Field validation across Israel's borders, NATO exercises, the UK and German Ministries of Defense, and U.S. Army units
• Detection beyond drones: IMSI catchers, tactical radios, cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and satellite comms
• Why passive sensing means zero emissions, and how ODIN augments radar and other sensors without adding exposure
• Hardware built on commercial off-the-shelf components, deployable in minutes on drones, vehicles, masts, tripods, or a soldier's backpack
• Scaling in the U.S.: the Austin subsidiary, DIU program work, and R2's first commercial agreement with the DoW
• Flexible commercial models, from amortized military contracts to subscription-based sensing as a service
• Why Onn believes the electromagnetic spectrum is the new high ground, and how cheap drones and jammers are rewriting war economics

As Onn puts it, the platforms still selling standalone sensors the old way are fighting yesterday's war.

Testing RF systems has always meant one of two things: expensive lab hardware or expensive field time. Neither scales, and neither works when the environment you're trying to replicate is a battlefield, not a bench.

In this episode, I sit down with Daniel Ferber and Barr, founders of RFix AI, who set out to solve that problem with software instead of steel. Their platform simulates complex RF transmission scenarios without the racks of equipment traditionally required, running instead on standard hardware, including smartphones and basic laptops.

What makes their approach different is the architecture. RFix AI's simulations don't depend on cloud infrastructure, which means they can run fully air-gapped, a critical requirement for defense clients who can't risk sensitive RF data touching an external network. Combined with a lightweight footprint, that opens the door to use cases ranging from missile communication testing to AI model training to telecom network planning, all without the cost and lead time of physical test ranges.

We get into:

• The military RF challenges that pushed the founders toward building a simulation-first alternative
• How the team's mixed background in aviation engineering, army service, and software shaped the product
• The technical case for running high-fidelity RF simulation on minimal hardware
• Why air-gapped, cloud-independent deployment is a differentiator for defense buyers
• RFix AI's current footprint with Israeli clients and its roadmap into the U.S. defense sector
• How program managers can get hands-on with a demo directly through the RFix AI website

Daniel and Barr's pitch is straightforward: RF teams shouldn't need a warehouse of equipment to know if their system will work in the field.

The modern battlefield has made GPS unreliable. Jamming, spoofing, and degraded signal environments are now standard operating conditions, and most drone systems weren't built for that reality.

Yonatan Samet is the CTO of Sightec, an Israeli defense tech company that has spent years solving exactly that problem. Sightec builds vision-based autonomy software that allows drones and UAVs to navigate, operate, and land precisely without any dependence on GPS. The team is an unusual mix: AI engineers and veteran UAV pilots who have flown in the environments the technology is designed for. That combination, Yonatan argues, is what separates a system that works in the lab from one that survives in the field.

Their two flagship products, NavSite for GPS-denied navigation and Terrasite for precision landing, are already deployed across more than 4,000 systems globally, across defense and commercial operators, and across a wide range of aircraft types. Integration takes under three days.

In this conversation, we get into:

• Why GPS degradation and jamming have become the baseline challenge for drone operators worldwide
• How vision-based autonomy addresses the pilot bottleneck and reduces the cognitive load on operators
• The difference between NavSite and Terrasite, and how they work together
• What it means to be combat-proven, and why that matters when selling to defense customers
• How easing Israeli export regulations has opened up international market access
• Sightec's flexible business model, from one-time sales to subscriptions, and why customer support is central to the strategy
• The roadmap beyond flight safety into mission-specific autonomy capabilities

Yonatan's perspective is shaped by a career moving between automotive autonomy and defense UAVs, and he's clear about what that transition taught him: full-cycle integration and end-user understanding aren't optional. They're the product.

Getting power to the front line has always been a logistics challenge. Getting clean, reliable, on-demand energy there, without a supply chain built around gaseous hydrogen or diesel generators, is a different problem entirely.

Omer Hiram is the co-founder of IonFlux, an Israeli energy tech company building a system that generates hydrogen and electricity directly in the field, using solid aluminum fuel pods and water. No external power source. No hydrogen transport. The aluminum reacts with water to produce hydrogen on demand, which is then converted into usable electricity. The fuel itself is solid, stable, and far easier to move than pressurized gas.

It's a genuinely different approach to field power, and the use cases it opens up are wide-ranging.

In this conversation, we get into:

• Why generating hydrogen on demand is a fundamentally safer and more logistically manageable alternative to transporting it
• How the system powers drones, radios, batteries, and off-grid equipment without heavy infrastructure
• The design philosophy behind keeping it simple enough for end users while still being scalable
• Where IonFlux sits on the path from proof of concept to military pilots and U.S. market entry
• Why logistics, safety, and weight are as central to the product as the underlying chemistry
• The team's vision for backup power, field operations, and energy resilience across military and civilian contexts

Omer's core argument is practical: solid fuel pods that react with water are easier to store, safer to move, and more deployable in constrained environments than anything built around conventional hydrogen logistics. The question isn't whether field power needs to improve, it's whether the solution can actually survive the last mile.

Modern warfare doesn't just see you with the naked eye. It sees you in thermal, in radar, in electro-optical. And most camouflage solutions were built for a different era.

Arnon Kraemer is the CEO and founder of Invisig, an Israeli defense tech company building what he calls an electronic chameleon: a smart, multispectral signature management system that helps vehicles and critical assets evade detection across visual, thermal, radar, and other sensing channels simultaneously. The concept is rooted in dynamic deception rather than static concealment, using adaptive, lightweight materials that can respond in real time to the surrounding environment, with minimal power draw.

Arnon comes to the problem with a sharp operational lens. As a former fighter pilot and defense systems operator, he saw firsthand how detection and targeting have evolved, and how protection hasn't kept pace. The moment of inspiration he describes is vivid: watching a chameleon and asking what it would look like to build that capability into a piece of military hardware.

In this conversation, we get into:

• Why drones, thermal imaging, and electro-optical systems have fundamentally changed battlefield survivability
• How Invisig's system moves beyond camouflage into active, layered signature management
• The modular, carry-on approach that makes it compatible with vehicles and command posts without major integration work
• Where the technology sits in TRL progression and what field testing has shown
• The path toward manufacturing scale and strategic partnerships
• Potential applications across ground forces, naval platforms, and air defense infrastructure

Arnon's framing is straightforward: protect the protectors. The technology Invisig is building exists to give troops and equipment a fighting chance against the targeting systems that now define the modern battlefield.

True drone swarm autonomy doesn't come from software alone — it requires hardware that lets drones communicate directly with each other without relying on a central controller or vulnerable communication links. SpherePoint is building that hardware layer by repurposing off-the-shelf automotive radar chips into tactical transponders that enable peer-to-peer drone communication, jam-resistant coordination, and real swarm behavior at a fraction of traditional defense costs. In this episode, David Sherer, co-founder of SpherePoint, explains how the company pivoted from friendly fire prevention into swarm enablement, why the gap between China's choreographed drone displays and battlefield-ready autonomous swarms is wider than most people realize, and how patented radar-based communication solves the bandwidth and resilience problems that software-only approaches cannot. We cover real-world applications from search and rescue systems deployed on Blackhawk helicopters to counter-UAS and offensive swarm operations, the economic logic of low-cost scalable swarms for both attack and defense, and how rapid iteration during active conflict in Israel has accelerated development. David also walks us through SpherePoint's commercialization strategy built around hardware licensing and ecosystem integration, current partnerships with top defense primes, and plans for US market entry and operational presence.

Autonomous drones, manned aircraft, sensors, and effectors are flooding the battlespace — but without a coordination layer, more platforms just means more chaos. Airwayz is building the operating system that synchronizes human and autonomous systems across air, ground, and maritime domains. In this episode, Yaron Rosen, Executive Chairman of Airwayz, draws on a career spanning military aviation, cyber, and defense investment to explain why the hardest problem in autonomy isn't the vehicles themselves — it's getting them to work together. We cover how the Airwayz platform acts as a vendor-agnostic brain for airspace management, integrating diverse sensors and effectors through an open API architecture, real-world deployments with the IDF, NATO, European critical infrastructure, and FIFA event security, and why natural language interfaces and AI agents are changing how operators plan and respond in real time. Yaron also walks us through the company's approach to supervised autonomy, how legal and operational constraints get embedded directly into decision systems, and the strategy for scaling across US federal operations, defense programs, and civilian urban environments.

Traditional threat detection systems depend on centralized infrastructure, GPS, and constant connectivity exactly the things that fail first in contested environments. Noxtar built a portable, AI-powered detection node that processes raw physics data at the edge, operates for up to six hours on battery, and networks with other nodes through a resilient mesh, all without calling home. In this episode, Bari Shpigel, founder of Noxtar, explains how his veteran-led team combined full-color night vision in complete darkness with real-time anomaly detection and predictive threat alerts in a lightweight, rapidly deployable package. We cover why edge AI processing eliminates the single points of failure that plague backhaul-dependent systems, how physics-based modeling and online learning allow the system to adapt to new environments on the spot, and the operational nuances of distinguishing real threats from doors, animals, and shadows in complex tactical scenarios. Bari also walks us through current TRL 7 readiness, field testing results, the business model built around one-time purchase with over-the-air AI pack updates, and Noxtar's strategy for scaling into US homeland security, law enforcement, and special operations markets.

After October 7, the Israeli defense establishment's timeline for unmanned ground vehicles compressed from years to weeks. Ottopia pivoted from civilian autonomous driving to military applications and was retrofitting large combat vehicles within days of the conflict. In this episode, Amit Rosenzweig, founder of Ottopia, explains how his team built a hybrid autonomy platform that blends AI, teleoperation, and human oversight into a modular operating system now running across hundreds of vehicles and thousands of operational hours in active conflict zones. We cover why pure autonomy isn't enough for contested environments and how layered control — AI handling the routine, operators stepping in for edge cases — solves the reliability problem at scale. Amit walks us through the architecture behind Ottopia's system including safety layers, cybersecurity, and MOSA compliance, the communication challenges of low-latency control in GPS-denied and network-degraded environments, and how retrofit kits enable OEMs and defense forces to convert existing fleets without building from scratch. We also discuss Ottopia's US expansion through their Detroit office, current IDF deployments, and the trajectory toward higher autonomy, increased uptime, and true autonomous mission execution.

Radar is expensive, optics need line of sight, and RF detection fails when drones switch to fiber optic control. Insignito is solving the drone detection problem with sound. In this episode, Itay Nourian, CEO of Insignito, explains how his team turned decades of acoustics expertise from a specialized Israeli military unit into a passive detection system that identifies drones at up to five kilometers, tracks swarms of dozens of targets simultaneously, and operates without revealing its own position — all at a fraction of the cost of legacy solutions. We cover why acoustic sensing holds a unique advantage as drone threats evolve from RF-controlled platforms to fiber optic FPVs, how proprietary simulation tools and an extensive drone noise database accelerate development and deployment, and the seamless API-based integration that allows their sensors to plug into existing defense architectures for point, perimeter, and mobile protection. Itay also walks us through TRL 9 readiness, current deployments across Israel, NATO, and the US, and upcoming capabilities including low-signature propeller design and active countermeasure solutions built for swarm defense.