FW MAG’s interview “Signals at the edge” has been published on FW-4/2026. It is a deep dive into how electronic warfare is being rewritten at the tactical frontline—and how one US-headquartered but increasingly Europe-centric player, Microwave Products Group (MPG), plans to shape that shift. It is not a generic industry profile, but a strategic conversation about doctrine, architectures and supply chains in a world where the electromagnetic spectrum has become its own battlespace.
The interview took place in Helsinki at AOC Europe 2026, where the Association of Old Crows brought together the ELINT, SIGINT and COMINT community under a telling theme: ‘Re-Arming Europe for Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority’. The choice of Finland (NATO’s newest member, now sitting on a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia) gives the discussion a frontline feel that runs through the entire piece. In effect, in the Russo Ukrainian War the spectrum is no longer a quiet enabler in the background, but a strategic battleground in its own right, contested by new tactics, hybrid operations and rapidly evolving emitters. Against this operational canvas, FW MAG sat down with Kevin Davis, Vice President Spectrum Operations at MPG, to explore how one RF and microwave specialist is rethinking both technology and organisation for this new reality.
Davis mapped out MPG’s evolution from a loose federation of RF specialists into a unified operating company under Dover Corporation with a deliberately end to end remit. This unification is not presented as a simple corporate story but as a resilience and surge capacity play: legacy facilities that once manufactured a single product type can now flex across multiple lines, with production spread from the US and Europe, in some cases even to a highly capable base in the Dominican Republic. For procurement officials and programme managers, this section of the interview will offer a rare, candid look at how an RF house is restructuring itself to absorb demand spikes without bottlenecking on one plant or one geography.
“Decision making at the edge” in Ukraine’s shadow
One of the interview’s central threads (and the inspiration for its title) is MPG’s concept of ‘EW decision making at the edge’. Davis used Ukraine as the operational laboratory that has made the shortcomings of centralised EW and SIGINT painfully clear. In brief, intelligence cannot wait for headquarters hundreds of kilometres away, whether in Kyiv or elsewhere. Instead, it must be available at the lowest tactical level, in real time. What MPG is pushing, the interview will reveal, is an RF/ML driven architecture where non specialist personnel at the front line receive pre processed, classified, confidence scored information that allows them to answer immediate questions: What is that RF signal moving towards me? Is it hostile? Is it ours? Do I engage or take cover? Hence, this is about radically distributing intelligence so that EW becomes a function of every platoon, battery or ship, not just a specialist cell in the rear.
RF/ML versus traditional ELINT
For readers steeped in classic ESM/ELINT doctrine, one of the most compelling sections will be Davis’s comparison between human centric signal analysis and RF/ML. He explained to FW MAG that traditional ELINT is built on scarce, slow to develop expertise, namely analysts whose pattern recognition takes years to build and can never be scaled out at the same speed as software. By contrast, the RF/ML approach MPG is developing can process thousands of signals simultaneously, with models that continually reinforce and refine confidence scores as they encounter new propagation environments. The interview does not shy away from the hard problems: adversarial signal design, cognitive emitters and deliberately evasive waveforms are identified as the current technical boundary, pushing MPG into active work on keeping models robust against manipulation, not just natural variation.
Europe as engineering centre of gravity
Moving from technology to geography, Davis underscores Europe’s value as an engineering centre of gravity: MPG’s CTO now sits in York, MPG Europe has become a primary development hub, and the company is actively tapping RF talent from universities in the UK, Spain and Croatia while exploring additional European sites that could leverage Dover’s existing footprint. The RF engineering talent pipeline from European universities (in the UK, Spain, Croatia and beyond) is producing strong RF engineers. Davis’s comments on future facilities across Europe, potentially leveraging Dover Corporation’s existing infrastructure, will provide readers with forward looking signals about localisation, co development and where MPG may embed itself next.
Modular “catalogue of capabilities” and space
Looking three to five years ahead, drone proliferation, software defined emitters and spectrum congestion are forcing RF players to abandon static product lists. Davis described MPG’s answer as a modular “catalogue of capabilities” that customers can rapidly configure and recombine as threat environments change, whether that means retuning drone frequencies overnight or assembling tailored RF chains for specific missions. He also points to the rapid expansion of the space domain in electromagnetic warfare, noting MPG’s work on filters, switches and chips qualified for space applications. Taken together, these insights sketch an RF portfolio strategy built around acceleration—faster identification, geolocation and handoff—and domain agnosticism across land, sea, air and space.
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