December is the month and the 23rd is the day.
You’ve probably been hearing a lot about DJI drones and the process that will ban the sale of any of their drone products in the United States.
I thought I might dive into the ban and try to make some sense of it. Of course, the beautiful part of it is that as radio engineers, we can all kind of relate to what is going on in this technology-adjacent industry because the FCC is involved in it and we’re familiar with their processes.
The overarching concern with DJI and the United States government is that they are a Chinese-based technology company and most sources confirm that there is little to no air gap between the information that the company collects and the Chinese government.
I know it sounds conspiratorial, but every drone flight that occurs gets documented with video, photographs and also carries with it an incredible amount of metadata that could be useful to any government, including our own, as a means to determine vulnerabilities in areas that we might consider trivial, but can be woven together to create a fairly detailed tapestry of information.
It reminds me of the time that my wife and I purchased our first robot vacuum. For whatever reason, I thought that the model I purchased was WiFi-enabled (it actually wasn’t), but in preparation, I downloaded the app from the company so that we could control it.
When I registered my address, the app immediately showed the layout of my house. Huh? I had not even received the unit yet and my house layout was already there. How much information could they glean after it was connected to my WiFi and had had a chance to run through the house innocuously cleaning my floors a couple of hundred times?
We live in the information age, and we give so much of it away for free without a thought to how valuable a commodity it really is.
To be honest, I generally don’t think in terms like this, and I don’t think anybody is interested in where my shoes always end up on the floor, but if leaders in our government place a premium on the data, you can bet your bottom dollar that other governments do as well.
Drones can end up giving you so much more data than that robot vacuum ever could. The key is that the drone, via its hyper-accurate GPS and telemetry chips, knows its height and coordinates on the planet down to the fraction of an inch at any given time interval, and that is a lot of extra data attached to the media it produces.
In a process known as “photogrammetry,” drones can be programmed to fly in a patterned grid while taking a 4K picture at each location.
All the pictures can then be loaded up into services that can stitch together each shot into a super high-definition compilation shot of the entire area that the drone flew over. If you were inclined, you could take that same picture with all the included metadata and begin to pull things like topological surveys using GIS tools (easily available in any municipality or state) and a host of other information.
In fact, there are dedicated business models that use this from pre-programmed flights to increase workplace safety and even to check on contractors to make certain they are doing right by their customers.
It isn’t that other companies like Autel, Fimi, Hubsan or Parrot can’t do the same thing. The issue with DJI, to put it simply, is that they are the absolute best. In the “prosumer” and commercial spaces they occupy, they have about a 75% market share. They have been doing it longer than most, and their ecosystem is better than any of the manufacturers that are out there.
A parallel company that might bring a clearer picture to mind of what DJI is to the industry is Apple. From top to bottom, their infrastructure allows you to upload your material to their server, use their tools to easily edit videos and pictures, and their product quality always seems to be about 1 year in front of almost every other manufacturer.
So, what happens when this ban takes effect on Dec. 23?
Unless a cyber security review occurs over DJI’s entire infrastructure before that date, and there doesn’t seem to be any on the horizon, the FCC will no longer provide signal approval to any new drone models placed before it by DJI. This means no new models will be available to any consumers within the United States and it will be illegal to procure them from other countries as well.
The ban also will allow the FCC to retroactively remove previously approved signals if they determine that they are a cybersecurity risk.
To give an example, DJI’s latest drone models in 2025 are the Mavic 4 Pro and the Mini 5 Pro. These products are already on store shelves and have been previously approved by the FCC so they currently wouldn’t be banned, but the FCC could come along in the future and begin the process of removing their approved signal status.
Of course, this is where our knowledge of the FCC comes into play.
In order for them to do this, they would have to post a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) regarding the removal of the status of one or both of these drones. Then the standard 60-day period for public comments would allow anybody to give arguments for or against the proposed rule changes.
If the FCC moved, then, for a retroactive ban to occur on either of those two previously approved products, they would then be pulled from store shelves and would be illegal to fly. Up until that time, both models can continue to be made and imported by DJI in their current form.
This obviously puts a clamp on any new drone innovation coming to the United States from DJI.
The ban does not affect your ability to fly any DJI drone that you already have in your possession, as all of them have already received signal approval from the FCC. So fly, fly like the wind.
It is hard for me to imagine that retroactively banning any other of DJI’s drones will happen, but I’m also not certain that I would risk spending $1,500 to $5,000 on a new model that may not be able to be used a year from now.
So many of their previous models are used by all levels of government for public safety and other uses like search and rescue operations. Private companies including my employer use them to inspect properties, farmers use them for dusting and verifying their crops. Our company has DJI Phantom 4 Pro Plus and Mavic Air 2S units which are incredible, but the Phantoms are also getting older.
What are we to do? My personal DJI Air2S is an absolute hot rod, and I love it, but it is also about three years old. Obviously, both models are probably outside of the FCC’s security concerns, but replacement of either of the units with ones that as capable as either of them would be a real stretch.
Generally, we aren’t affected by the ban until we want to replace our aging units with new ones or any that we own potentially end up being retroactively removed from the approved signals list. Let’s pray for that not to happen because I really do enjoy flying drones, especially when they are the best of the best.
This originally appeared TV Tech's sister brand, Radio World.
