The FCC has proposed fines of $25,000 each against eight companies — Cogito Tech, Fixaxo Technology, Lyno Dynamics, Skyhigh Tech, Spatial Hover, SZ Knowact, WaveGo Tech, and Xtra Technology — for failing to respond to investigative letters asking whether they market radio equipment that belongs on the agency's Covered List The Verge.

The companies have until Monday, July 20th — 10 calendar days from the announcement — to answer the FCC's questions before the agency takes further action The Verge.

SZ Knowact is the entity behind the Skyrover drone brand, one of the eight firms named in the proposed fines The Verge. The Covered List itself dates to December 22, when the FCC added all foreign drone companies to it, a designation that bars the agency from issuing radio-frequency device authorizations to those firms on national security grounds The Verge.

What gives this enforcement action its teeth is a separate authority the FCC previously granted itself: the power to retroactively revoke equipment authorizations already completed if the underlying device is later found to contain components sourced from a banned company The Verge. That retroactive clawback provision is what makes the timing of several authorizations notable.

DJI secured FCC authorization for its Osmo Pocket 4 Pro on November 26th, roughly four weeks ahead of the December 22 Covered List deadline for foreign drone makers The Verge. Xtra, one of the eight companies now facing fines, obtained its own FCC authorization documents on June 17th The Verge. Neither filing currently appears in the FCC's public equipment authorization search engine The Verge, a gap that has drawn scrutiny given the sequence of dates.

The FCC may also be investigating SGS-CTST, a test lab, for its role in helping products connected to banned companies pass through the equipment certification process The Verge. Test labs occupy a gatekeeping function in the FCC authorization pipeline, verifying that radio equipment meets emissions and interference standards before a device can legally ship in the US market. Scrutiny of a lab itself, rather than just the manufacturers submitting to it, signals the FCC is examining the certification pipeline structurally rather than case by case.

The regulatory backdrop stretches back further. The FCC's December 2025 order barred imports of all new models of foreign-made drones and critical components, DJI's included Reuters. DJI responded by filing a lawsuit on February 24, 2026, challenging that import ban Reuters. In late May, DJI told US lawmakers that an independent review found its drones pose no security risks Reuters, a position the company has maintained throughout the dispute.

The regulatory picture has not moved in a single direction. In June, a US agency removed Chinese toy drones from an import ban list Reuters, suggesting some calibration in scope even as enforcement against larger commercial and consumer platforms tightens. And on July 1, the FCC published a Fact Sheet addressing national security protections in which it considered — and explicitly rejected — a blanket ban on all foreign-produced components, calling that approach overly burdensome FCC.

That rejection is worth flagging as a signal of the agency's intended posture. Rather than a categorical prohibition on foreign components, the FCC appears to be pursuing a company-specific and lab-specific enforcement model, one that targets named entities and the certification chain they pass through rather than banning entire supply-chain categories outright. The eight fines proposed this week fit that pattern: the agency is not accusing these firms of shipping banned radios, only of stonewalling questions about whether they might be.

The dates around the Osmo Pocket 4 Pro and Xtra authorizations invite an obvious question the FCC has not yet answered publicly: whether either filing was designed to beat a regulatory deadline, and whether the absence of both records from the public search tool reflects routine processing lag or something the agency is actively reviewing. Until July 20th arrives and the eight companies either respond or don't, that question sits alongside a broader one — how much capacity the FCC's retroactive-revocation authority actually has to unwind authorizations granted just before a Covered List designation took effect. Drone hobbyists and commercial operators who bought hardware in the narrow window between November and December will be watching that answer as closely as the companies now facing fines.