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Sell counter-UAS into corrections and critical infrastructure — without competing on prime-vendor pricing

6 min read SkySuite Team

Every corrections facility, critical-infrastructure operator, and military training range has the same problem on the radar side: the off-the-shelf options come from defense primes, run between $800K and $2.5M for a single-facility deployment, and ship on the prime’s timeline (rarely under nine months). Their RFPs read like they were written to accept exactly one vendor.

The buyer’s actual budget — the one they have on hand, not the one they’re hoping for in next fiscal — sits between $50K and $200K. They want detection on their fence line in the next 90 days, not in a year, and they want the data to drop into whatever TAK or operations picture they already run.

This is the contract you can win.

What the buyer actually needs (and what the prime is selling)

Three layers of capability, ranked by what the buyer is willing to pay for today:

  1. Cooperative drone detection. ADS-B and Remote ID (WiFi + BLE). This is 80% of unauthorized incursions today and 95% of FAA-mandated reportable events. You can deliver this layer immediately, with civilian-grade hardware, and it is what gets their facility compliant with the directive on their desk.
  2. Non-cooperative drone detection. Passive RF, eventually primary radar. This is the layer the primes oversell and the buyer slow-rolls because the threat volume doesn’t match the price tag.
  3. Mitigation. Authority-restricted. The buyer rarely owns this in the first deployment. Don’t sell what isn’t legal for them to operate.

Most prime bids package all three layers, force the buyer to pay for layer 3 they can’t use, and ship layer 1 wrapped in $800K of integration work. You sell layer 1 + layer 2 incrementally, on commodity hardware, with the integration that already exists.

The system you’re pitching

A SkyRadar CM5 ground station is the foot in the door. One unit covers a single facility’s airspace — a corrections yard, a substation, a training range perimeter. Hardware specs the buyer cares about:

  • Part 146 ADSP certification. This is the credential their compliance officer is required to ask for. Civilian-built hardware can meet this; not all of it does.
  • ADS-B 1090 MHz receiver. Cooperative aircraft detection.
  • WiFi + BLE Remote ID. Required by the 2026 FAA rule; this catches every Remote-ID-compliant drone in the broadcast range.
  • GPS-disciplined timestamp. Necessary for any multi-station mesh or court-admissible event log.

For triangulation (locate the operator, not just the drone), you mesh multiple CM5 units across a perimeter. That’s the upsell after the first deployment proves out — and it doesn’t require ripping out the first install.

RTK truth files — the part the primes don’t sell

If the buyer is a test range — DoD, DHS, a state-run UAS test site — they need ground-truth flight paths to validate their own sensors against. SkySuite exports RTK CSV files at 100ms cadence (timestamp, lat, lon, MSL altitude) interpolated from mission waypoints. This is what the range operator uses to score their radar’s accuracy.

The primes don’t sell this because it’s not in their stack. The pilot who can deliver authorized flights with a validated truth file at the range commander’s desired cadence becomes the range’s preferred vendor — without any C-UAS hardware sale. Lead with this if you’re bidding for range work.

The bid you write

Three line items, in this order:

  1. One CM5 ground station, deployed, configured, and integrated into [buyer’s existing operations picture] within 30 days from contract. Hardware, install, training. Fixed price.
  2. Monthly monitoring + maintenance retainer. Firmware updates, compliance reports, quarterly threat-pattern briefing. Recurring.
  3. Optional: RTK truth-file generation for [range/test site]. Per-flight or block-of-flights pricing.

Don’t bid line 2 mitigation. Don’t bid response-engagement. If the buyer asks, point them to the authority that owns those layers and offer to integrate with whatever they procure later.

What to bring to the first technical meeting

  • A live SkyRadar dashboard showing one of your existing deployments (or a demo deployment). Five drone tracks in the air, RID metadata visible, GPS-disciplined timestamps in the log.
  • A sample chain-of-custody event packet from a past authorized flight. Court-admissible field formatting.
  • The proposed integration list: TAK Server, ATAK, Cursor on Target feed, whatever they already run. You’re not asking them to switch tools — you’re offering a feed.

The technical meeting is the close. Procurement is the formality afterwards.

The detection + planning + documentation stack: SkySuite’s Government & Defense vertical — Part 146 ADSP hardware, SkyPlan RTK truth files, court-admissible chain-of-custody logs.