Enerdyne Adds Technology to Thwart Possible UAV Eavesdroppers

the sort of evolutionary and incremental improvement in video data link technologies that has characterized Enerdyne’s growth over the past six years.

Since its inception in 1984, Enerdyne has specialized in developing video transmission equipment under small Pentagon contracts for what the military calls ISR, for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. In the mid-1990s, the company based in the suburban San Diego community of El Cajon, CA, came up with a clever idea to provide video compression systems that proved useful to the military’s burgeoning fleet of UAVs. “That got the company in the door for doing video compression and video processing,” says Gardner, who joined Enerdyne in 2003.

It was a fateful period in the company’s growth. Under the direction of Brandon Nixon, who had stepped in as CEO from Housatonic Partners, a private equity firm that was then invested in Enerdyne, the company shifted its focus from video compression technology to developing integrated data link systems for UAVs. “What we saw was that the UAV market wasn’t being well-served by the existing technology,” Gardner told me.

In 2006, ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]], which specializes in satellite and wireless communications, acquired Enerdyne in a deal then valued at $17 million. ViaSat does not provide a break out of Enerdyne’s financial results, but Gardner says its business has been growing. Enerdyne’s staff has risen from 54 to 60 since ViaSat’s acquisition, and Gardner says its revenue has been climbing by roughly 30 percent annually since 2003.

Today the company works under contracts with the Department of Defense, and with a variety of U.S. defense companies, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications, and Insitu, as well as Tadiran and Rafael of Israel.

Nowadays, “making a UAV is really a pretty complicated thing,” Gardner says. “You really have to bring a lot of good technologies together… What we’ve been focusing on at Enerdyne is making that next generation of digital video and data link systems.” And keeping the bad guys from tuning into the video broadcast by UAVs.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.