A Ukrainian company has built a drone link designed to keep working when the enemy tries to jam it. Ukraine's defense-tech firm Rise Technologies has developed the Nakande digital communication system, designed for rapid integration into small and large FPV drones, bombers, and fixed-wing platforms, commercial director Viktor Chuikovskyi says, Defender Media reports.

The system attacks the connectivity problem that jamming creates for Ukraine's drones. On a front saturated with electronic warfare, drones that lose their radio link become useless, and Nakande answers that by constantly hopping frequencies to find clear air.

How the frequency-hopping works

Nakande's defining feature is its ability to change frequency. It hops across a tuning range of up to 1,000 MHz, monitoring channels within that band, finding a freer stretch, and automatically switching to it, Chuikovskyi said, which lets operators keep their link to drones amid electronic warfare and a congested radio spectrum.

That is the core countermeasure to jamming. By moving to whatever frequency is clear rather than staying on one the enemy can block, the system stays connected where a fixed-frequency link would be jammed dead.

What the link carries

Nakande's airborne module weighs 160 grams, supports 2×Ethernet and MAVLink, and combines control, telemetry, and video in a single secure link, with a downlink up to 5.2 Mbit/s that the maker says delivers clean video and a compressed 4K stream, protected by AES-256 encryption.

It is built for fast, flexible setup. The ground station deploys in under five minutes. Its standard IP architecture allows the operator, antenna, and control point to be separated over Ethernet, fiber, or VPN, and a single ground station can connect 50 to 100 modules.

It held a link past 100 kilometers

Nakande has been tested in combat, the maker says. It passed bench, field, and combat checks, with a dedicated range class up to 60 kilometers for FPV drones, and in testing its maximum configuration, held a link at 118 kilometers, Chuikovskyi said.

The company did not disclose the module's price but said it is several times lower than foreign equivalents.

Ukraine's defense technology cluster Brave1 has launched the development of anti-drone rifle rounds, significantly increasing the chances of hitting fast-moving aerial targets, the group said in a statement on June 30.

According to Brave1, the ammunition appears similar to standard rounds used in automatic rifles but features a specially designed warhead that increases the likelihood of shooting down FPV (first-person-view) drones or commercial quadcopters such as the DJI Mavic before they strike.

These types of drones are being used extensively on the battlefield by both Ukrainian and Russian forces. The cost-effective FPV drones have proven highly effective in destroying expensive military equipment.

The manufacturer has already codified the new rounds according to NATO standards, Brave1 said. The goal is to supply every infantry soldier with a magazine of specialized ammunition for use in case of aerial threats.

"These rounds that significantly improve the chances of hitting a moving target are a new development by Brave1," Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.

"Our common goal is to ensure that every infantryman has a magazine of such ammunition and can equip his rifle with it in case of an air threat."

Ukraine continues to scale up its drone warfare capabilities. The Defense Ministry said on March 10 that it plans to purchase 4.5 million FPV drones in 2025 at a cost exceeding Hr 110 billion ($2.6 billion), with most of the funds allocated through the Defense Procurement Agency.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has set a goal of producing at least 30,000 long-range drones in 2025.

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The Kyiv IndependentYuliia Taradiuk