Canadian defence communications has a software problem. The hardware is mostly fine. The constellations are coming online, the radios are getting smaller and tougher, the drones are getting cheaper by the month. What we do not have, from a Canadian company, is the layer that makes all that hardware work together when the spectrum is contested, the geometry is bad, or the adversary is jamming. That layer is the difference between equipment on a shelf and capability in the field.
Quick word on the company. Photon-IV Inc. is a Waterloo-based deep-tech company. Canadian-owned, Canadian-controlled. No VC money, no foreign control. Just a small shop building one thing across a handful of products, and building it for defence.
Here is the lineup.
Stellarlink keeps the terminal connected. Picture a soldier in Resolute with a satellite radio. Picture a forward operating base in contested terrain. Picture a vehicle moving through a zone where the spectrum is degraded and the operator does not have time to think about which bird is overhead. The terminal needs to know which satellite is coming over the horizon, which one is fading out, and when to switch. Stellarlink runs that decision close to the radio itself, without a call home to a cloud and without a dependency on a foreign operator's roadmap. The link stays up because the software saw the handover coming before the user did. Simple as that.
SwarmNet keeps the drones connected to each other and to the pilot. This is the one I think people will care most about at CANSEC, given everything coming out of Ukraine. Every drone in a swarm is a node, and every node can fail. SwarmNet meshes them together so they relay through each other when the direct link to the pilot drops, then routes that mesh up through a satellite backhaul when the local RF is jammed or out of range. Every command coming down and every status coming up is cryptographically signed, so a spoofed command from an adversary gets rejected at the drone, not at the operator. The pilot keeps control of the swarm even when the swarm is past the horizon, in the trees, or under electronic attack. That last bit matters more than people realise.
Predict tracks the assets. A fleet of trucks moving through a Latvian forest. A convoy crossing the Arctic. A set of sensors deployed along a coastline. All of them with small satellite radios that have to sip battery and still report in. Predict knows when each asset's next satellite pass is, schedules the transmission for the window where the link will actually close, and tells the asset to stay silent the rest of the time. Battery life stretches from days to months. Command sees every vehicle, sensor, and unit, and knows when the next update will land. The thing actually works in the field, which is the part most fleet tracking pitches gloss over.
Spectra is the umbrella. It is the intelligence framework that ties everything together into one orchestration brain, so a single operations centre can run the terminals, the swarms, and the asset fleet with the same logic underneath. Predict the link, decide the handover, sign the command, log the decision. Same loop, multiple use cases. That coherence is the whole point.
If you want a meeting at CANSEC, the team is taking bookings
The orchestration layer sits above the ground segment and below the mission. That is the fight worth showing up for. Go say hi to the Photon-IV crew in Ottawa.