This project focuses on adding unique telemetry and communication capability to one of the largest and fastest growing areas in the Washington State aerospace industry: Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). These systems have the potential to revolutionize a wide variety of commercial applications such as precision agriculture, disaster management, mapping, and ecological/biological monitoring and represents a $13.6 billion civilian market. One of the main challenges for UAS integration is to provide reliable and effective guarantees for safe operation that in turn requires high-performance and flexible control/navigation of the aircraft and reliable transmission modes from air to a ground control station or operator. For example, a typical commercially available UAV will have 3 distinct sensor-processing-radio chains, one each for onboard camera, one for data telemetry (navigation and strategic command) and one for primary command & control data. This effort fundamentally seeks to mature ongoing work at UW and will allow for greater communication bandwidth, enhanced flexibility, and levels of control between the UAS and GCS and achieve the required situational awareness as mandated for UAS operations. The outcome of this project will be a modular, encapsulated radio system that can be used to combine the myriad data links between a UAS and the GCS into a single, robust, and reconfigurable link. The link quality will be tested using a bladeRF software defined radio paired with a student built, Pixhawk based octocopter. Several flights tests will be conducted by students using custom built software which will measure the strength of the UAV based link in various environments. This project encapsulates the construction of the octocopter, the build of the software defined radio system, and flight testing. A publicly accessible link quality database will be populated with fight test data in order to encourage further development of software defined based communication links.