Flinders University’s PEWTER program — Programme in Electromagnetic Warfare Technology, Education and Research — was established through a Defence Science Partnering Deed between DST Group and Flinders in 2020, creating Australia’s only postgraduate EW curriculum delivered at NV1-gated depth. Over six years the program has built Australia’s Electromagnetic Warfare talent pipeline from the ground up: cleared students from Defence, industry, and the national security sector have completed graduate certificates, diplomas, and masters degrees at Flinders’ Centre for Defence Engineering Research and Training (CDERT), producing the country’s first formally credentialled cohort of EW specialists.
SDR 2026’s academic lead is Professor Sam Drake — DST Group Chair of Electromagnetic Warfare, Co-Director of CDERT, inaugural Flinders Chair of Electromagnetic Systems and Security, and the architect of the PEWTER curriculum. He was a co-organiser of the inaugural Australian GNU Radio Days in 2025.
Sam’s path into the EW chair is unusual and unusually well-suited to the discipline. His PhD, undertaken with the Mathematical Physics group at the University of Adelaide, was on axisymmetric space-times in general relativity; a post-doctoral position at the University of Padua extended that work to relativistic dynamics around rotating compact stars. He then joined DSTO/DSTG as a Defence scientist, representing Australia as a subject-matter expert in government-to-government collaborations with Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, and working alongside Raytheon and Boeing on the electromagnetic security systems of Australian fighter aircraft.
For an SDR audience his published work is directly relevant: gravitational time-dilation effects on GPS satellites — the foundational physics underpinning every GNSS-disciplined receiver and coherent timing chain — alongside single-channel direction-finding combining pseudo-Doppler with MUSIC, discrete probability-map representations for distributed-sensor emitter localisation, and autonomous UAV-based EW sensor and effector systems. His current research at Flinders sits under the banner of Spectrum Security: ensuring that information carried by electromagnetic waves reaches its intended recipients, in an environment where increasing parts of the spectrum are contested. The arc from general relativity through satellite navigation, emitter geolocation and operational EW to spectrum security is the cross-disciplinary range this conference is built to host.
SDR 2026 includes a dedicated Classified Day alongside the open conference program — a space for defence and security attendees to present and discuss work that cannot be shared in an unclassified setting. If your organisation operates in contested spectrum, electromagnetic warfare, or related sensing domains and has material suited to a cleared audience, the Classified Day is designed for you.
Learn about the Classified Day →
PEWTER postgraduate programs in Electromagnetic Warfare & Signal Intelligence:
For enquiries about the conference or the EW programs, contact sdrcon26@flinders.edu.au