The FCC has proposed $25,000 fines each against eight companies — Cogito Tech, Fixaxo Technology, Lyno Dynamics, Skyhigh Tech, Spatial Hover, SZ Knowact, WaveGo Tech, and Xtra Technology — for ignoring investigative letters asking whether they sell radio equipment that the agency has flagged as prohibited The Verge.

The companies have until July 20th — ten calendar days from the announcement — to respond before the FCC moves forward with enforcement action The Verge.

What is the Covered List?

SZ Knowact, one of the eight companies facing fines, operates the Skyrover drone brand The Verge. The so-called Covered List — created December 22 — includes all foreign drone companies, a designation barring the FCC from issuing radio-frequency device authorizations to those firms based on national security grounds The Verge.

Why the Timing Matters

What makes this enforcement action consequential is the FCC's ability to retroactively revoke equipment authorizations — the formal approvals that allow devices to legally operate in the US — if those devices are later found to contain components from a banned company The Verge. That clawback power explains why certain approval dates stand out.

DJI secured FCC authorization for its Osmo Pocket 4 Pro on November 26th, roughly four weeks before the December 22 deadline for foreign drone companies joining the Covered List The Verge. Xtra, now facing fines, obtained its own FCC authorization on June 17th The Verge. Neither filing shows up in the FCC's public search database, a gap that has raised questions given the sequence of events The Verge.

A Closer Look at the Certification Pipeline

The FCC may also be investigating SGS-CTST, a test laboratory, for helping products connected to banned companies pass through the certification process The Verge. Test labs act as gatekeepers in the FCC authorization process, confirming that radio equipment meets emissions and interference standards before devices can legally sell in the US market. Scrutiny of a lab itself signals the FCC is examining the certification structure as a whole rather than just individual cases.

The Broader Regulatory Context

The FCC issued an import ban on all new models of foreign-made drones and their critical components in December 2025, including DJI products Reuters. DJI filed a lawsuit in February 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.

However, 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 the government is refining the scope of enforcement. More telling, the FCC published a Fact Sheet on July 1 addressing national security protections in which it explicitly rejected a blanket ban on all foreign-produced components, calling such an approach overly burdensome FCC.

Worth flagging: that rejection signals the FCC's strategy. Rather than banning entire categories of foreign components outright, the agency appears to be targeting specific companies and the laboratories they work with — pursuing a company-specific and lab-specific enforcement model that focuses on named entities rather than broad supply-chain prohibitions. The eight fines this week fit that pattern. The FCC is not accusing these firms of selling banned radios; it is holding them accountable for stonewalling questions about whether they might be.

The Open Questions

The timing around the Osmo Pocket 4 Pro and Xtra authorizations raises a straightforward question the FCC has not answered publicly: whether either filing was designed to preempt the regulatory deadline, and whether both records vanishing from the public database reflects normal processing delays or something the agency is actively reviewing. Until July 20th, when the eight companies either respond or stay silent, that question remains alongside a larger one — whether the FCC's retroactive-revocation authority can actually unwind authorizations granted in the narrow window just before the Covered List took effect. Drone hobbyists and commercial operators who purchased hardware between November and December will be paying close attention to that answer.