Tethered UAV applications require a power source on the ground and a tether to distribute the power to the drone. Continuously increasing power demand in the aircraft places much higher demands on the tether design itself. As power consumption in the aircraft increases, power losses in the tether increase nonlinearly and become difficult to manage. Tether losses can be minimized by increasing size of the wire, but there is a limit. A better approach is to match the Ground Based Source “GBS” architecture with a power converter in the aircraft. Similar to the electrical power grid, Vicor GBS systems transform up the distributed voltage through the tether to matched converters in the aircraft. With increasing distributed voltage, the distributed current can be minimized, and tether design becomes manageable.