but lacks target discrimination.

MoD should hire some proper marketing specialist. This unfortunate quote could be easily rewritten as:

The inclusive nature of the technology means that a wide, embracing beam is used, capable of gently deactivating multiple drones from diverse origins simultaneously.

But that's a chance we're willing to take.

We were RFDF'ing U-Boats in the Atlantic in the 40's, you're saying we can't track and triangulate drone radio bands in 2025?

Don't go after the drones, find the people at the controls. Start hauling them in front of a magistrate and watch the numbers of incidents plummet.

Or is that a silly idea because some weapon manufacturer isn't making a multi-million Pound single use contract to shoot down a £200 whirlybird?

Screw it, sick day.

Seems like you didn't read the article at all

Brilliant idea! If we could only get those pesky Russians to respond to a summons.

You'll find them comparing notes about Salisbury cathedral.

and cursing about perfumes bought in Russian duty free.

> gently deactivating multiple drones from diverse origins simultaneously.

It's time for the drone to DEI...

Courses in market segmentation are required.

They could market it to me if I could use it to take out the drones flown way too close to people/houses/me by inconsiderate idiots. Tried throwing rocks, but I'm not a very good shot.

Isn't the implication that it would also produce "friendly fire" and take down our drones too?

"friendly fire"

Yup, you are getting it!

South Park, October 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Bush

Would anyone care to hazard a guess about countermeasures that could be fitted to drones?

Unless you operate it with a long optic fibre you cannot shield it.

Rubbish. You can shield everything except a control antenna, and lightning protection demonstrates that you can expose an antenna without risking things it is connected to.

Yeah, the control antenna, which receives the radio transmission, where you pump in a few kilo-Watts of energy instead of the milli-Watts the circuits are designed for. Sure you can make them robust enough if you use [1]vavles which can take a 10000 fold overload better... But not for long - ever seen them melting? For me only in videos and pics, never real...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube

Someone once tried to convince me that the action of stripping electrons from a cathode was actually a form of atomic energy so should be banned.

So there.

Well, he is not wrong, but it is a negative balance. You don't gain energy out of it. You could reverse his argument by saying "they eat up beta radiation, those electrons". Don't tell Donald Trump about that negative balance. Or do, but wait until I sold my tube-maker stock.

Yes, you could do all of that and make a proper EMP hardened device like the the multi-million pound missiles. But then you have lost the drone's main advantage which is cost due to it being a mass-produced product using commercial off-the-shelf parts.

Thy can still be mass-produced, but the shielding is going to add a lot of weight and reduce range/payload. Current drone development is an endlessly fascinating arms race. I think only a fool would bet on where we end up in 10 years time. Right now it's sort of delicate rock-paper-scissors between the dark arts of EW, the FPS-weaned shotgun toting kids, and the OR-guided school of swarms/decoys/stealth/fibre optic and shielded electronics gear.

"Unless you operate it with a long optic fibre you cannot shield it."

The RF works on the internal electronics, EMP style, not the control antenna. To protect against that you need shielding, which increases weight and cost.

Except the antenna is connected to those electronics and is designed to pick up RF and you can't shield it.

Too much current on the antenna will fry the circuits just as well, probably better, than it being picked up via EMI on the PCB.

Stop trying to argue with electronics and RF engineers.

"Except the antenna is connected to those electronics and is designed to pick up RF and you can't shield it."

The point is, EMP also works when there is no antenna.

The only effective countermeasure would be to have a drone that can navigate with 100% dead-reckoning (no GNSS) and no remote control or telemetry (and plenty of shielding around wires and electronics, optoisolated components, etc). Such drones would have very few legitimate civilian use cases.

@Jou(Mytzplyck > Unless you operate it with a long optic fibre you cannot shield it.

Half-right, for the wrong reason.

You could use Fibre Optic Gyroscopes, which are much more accurate than MEMS IMUs (and more immune to noise) and would allow for inertial navigation without GNSS, but these sort of things are bulky and expensive, more commonly found in cruise missiles than drones

I'm not an engineer but as the zap ray is likely to come from down below and navigation signals from up above does that make shielding easier, esp at high frequency?

Perhaps, but I expect this weapon is mainly aimed at cheap amateur-built drones which could be launched by terrorists. Even if they can navigate by dead reckoning (e.g. inertial, plus optical map correlation), the article says it is "effective against targets that are resistant to electronic warfare" suggesting that it is powerful enough to "fry" some components, but I suspect that applies only if those components are unshielded or very poorly shielded.

If they were trying to take down a military drone such as a Shahed, or a drone that was designed with resistance to RF directed energy weapons in mind, then they would use the laser, or failing that, a missile.

Yeah, but I mean controlling the thing remotely with 7 km long fibre optic cable, not other usages. But for a controlled bombing run you could indeed do it this way instead of GPS/Glosnass, so I have to half agree with you.

No laser, no deal

No frikken sharks, no frikken deal!

Typical 50 cm to 100 cm dish, general direction the the drone, the frequency it operates on, hit the button on the [1]Cavity magnetron tuned to the frequency, circuits fried, done. Since the magnetron does not need to be as precise as needed for radar they can be produced very very very cheap.

So all in all sounds plausible to me, and could work near airports as well by using the typical RF frequency the drone(s) operate on with a more focused beam. Frying the RF circuit should be enough, the rest of the electronics don't matter if they survive. Yes yes, I write "more focused" for a reason, not "laser-perfect-focused" :D.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_magnetron

So could you also use it to defrost your dinner?

Yes, you could, like your kitchen device does.

And a not insignificant piece of kit it is too ....... [1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/17/british-army-radio-waves-take-down-drone-swarm/

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/17/british-army-radio-waves-take-down-drone-swarm/

If the photo is the kit in question then 50% of the size looks like an office for the controller to brew his tea. This is the prototype once up and running then it will be much smaller

Instant tea. Hot in a fraction of a second.

Something does not add up IMO . . .

Sales!

This is advertisement. Weapons are expensive. Selling more leads to lower prices.

The UK and NATO are not banking on drones. The more Russian, Iranian, Chinese, or Turkish drones are destroyed, the better.

I would like to think they can ship this to Ukrain PDQ (like in the next few weeks) but having once worked on an MOD project that was an “urgent operational requirement” for the ill-conceived (stupid) invasion of Iraq, I can say that the war was (quite literally) over by the time the project got anywhere near complete.

The MOD’s idea of “urgent” is …errr …. flexible

IIRC the Ukrainians have been building and deploying small, cheap attack drones and drone killers for at least a year, so go talk them about this technology.

1km range on the weapon.

Heavily dependent on how good your drone detection methods are

How well does it cope if drone navigating through built up area (buildings are good RF shields) rather than high in the air.

Would there be "collateral damage" to other electrical items in the built up area the drone passed through (presumably plan is to protect aforesaid built up area???)

RF waves can damage tissue too.....

Presumably current drones lack appreciable RF shielding to minimise weight (tare) and maximise payload.

That would likely change if these devices were to be deployed.

If the RF used is in the 1-1000GHz range the atmosphere absorbance would depend on the amount of water in the atmosphere along the path. So the attacking drone could be deployed on rainy days. I would guess based on the reflections from the targets and the environment the RF (pulses?) would be tailored (digitally synthesized) to avoid absorption by water vapour and oxygen molecules.

I cannot help thinking the completely mechanical V1 buzz bombs would be completely immune to these shenanigans.

Personally I would try autonomous hunter UAVs, with conventional airframes, that could rapidly identify and disable in flight drone weapons using fairly primitive technology (bullets?) The airframe technology could be pretty 20th century - a glider aerodynamics with aviation gasoline engine powered propellors so with decent onboard computing could remain in the air for extended periods both patrolling the sky and providing general surveillance. With peer to peer comms these UAVs could rapid assemble to deal with a large concerted drone attack. Could even be made from plywood and powered with Honda four stroke chainsaw engines. ;)

Which moves faster: A drone carrying an automatic shotgun (a glider, you say?) or a drone not carrying an automatic shotgun?

If the RF used is in the 1-1000GHz range the atmosphere absorbance would depend on the amount of water in the atmosphere along the path.

Hmm.. sooo.. Cheap shielding by wrapping your electronics in wet newspaper? Or soak corrugated cardboard and maybe the corrugations could act as waveguides for extra shielding. But Patrick Lancaster recently posted a video showing some detail of Russia's ISR and Lancet drones, the latter being mostly plastic & carbon. Lancets have been evolving pretty rapidly, so whether their composition could be modified to add shielding.

But that conflict has very much demonstrated the effectiveness of cheap drones, thus demonstrating the need for something to counter them. Kinda curious why the emphasis on 10p a shot, but that's probably to highlight the cost of current anti-drone tech, like 25mm or 30mm air defence rounds, or $$$ for missiles. Plus the down-range risks. So this system might fry a drone, but maybe also your TV or PC, smart phone etc if they're in the beam path. But that's probably better than being down-range of air defence artillery or missiles.

Can't the drones be shielded against this defence?

Yes.

Any further questions?

I posted my question when there were only 6 replies!

Bullocks! A quarter-inch thick (6 mm) thick box made out of Tungsten and use fibre-optics for internal communications to the Tungsten-shielded brushless motors and this drone defence system is DEFEATED! If the 6mm thick tungsten box is too heavy for containing the CPU controllers for your smaller drone, try thin sheets (1 mm) of Zinc-galvanized steel interspersed with glued-on 2 mm thick nylon sheets to form a Faraday Cage that works at multiple EM bands!

To cool your CPU electronics and drone controllers, immerse them fully in liquid silicone oil and use fins and heat-sinks to transfer the heat to the outside. For the antennas, use a multi-EM-band Fractal Antenna 3D printed directly on the outside of the drone hull and use a varistor in-between your sensitive electronics as a protection against RF induction overload! The Fractal antenna can be shaped for and 3D printed directly on the outer hull that will allow for 250 MHz up to 120 GHz radio operations using unjammable frequency-hopping and spread-spectrum modalities.

There! I fixed it! How hard can it be to RFI/EMI and Radiation-Harden your electronics?

V

Not hard, but expensive and heavy.

The target drones are the swarms of small and cheap drones that overwhelm air defenses and are used to bomb cities.

Heavy and expensive stuff van be taken down with conventional air defenses.