A new video transmitter for Wild Hornets’ drones, including its STING interceptors, has passed state tests, the Ukrainian drone maker told Militarnyi. The module sends a drone’s camera feed to its pilot. The company expects it to widen its interceptors’ operating radius.

Russia launched 140 Shahed-type drones at Ukraine overnight on 26 October and 280 the next night, when its main target was Kyiv, Air Force figures as of the morning show. Interceptor drones, which cost dozens of times less than the Shaheds they hunt, are one of Ukraine’s answers. The STING alone downed more than 3,000 drones in its first seven months of use, Wild Hornets says. If the company’s estimate holds, a 30 km radius would let each ground station cover more than twice the area it covers at 20 km.

What the testers checked

Specialists from the State Research Institute for Testing and Certification of Arms and Military Equipment and the Defense Ministry’s State Quality Assurance Directorate confirmed the module’s declared characteristics on three drone types, the company said. The three were the STING interceptor, the Queen of Hornets cargo platform, and the 10-inch Wild Hornets Digital anti-aircraft drone.

Some of the drones’ figures exceeded the values the company had set for them, Wild Hornets told Ukrainian defense outlet Oboronka, without saying which ones. Those figures will enter the official specifications after further field tests, it said.

More than double the power

The module, called HV VTX Pro, is part of an upgrade to Wild Hornets’ Hornet Vision digital video system. It more than doubles the transmitter’s maximum power, to 4 W. That sends a clear picture farther and makes the feed steadier in crowded airwaves and under electronic jamming, the company said.

Wild Hornets first described the module in August, when it was already in serial production. Its interceptors’ operating radius would grow from around 20 km to 30 km, the company said at the time. That estimate assumed good line of sight and the 360-degree antenna on its ground stations, according to a company statement Interfax-Ukraine quoted. Interception could also become at least 20% more effective against targets flying extremely low, the statement said.

Wild Hornets is a Ukrainian company that designs and builds drones, from strike FPV drones and cargo platforms to the STING, which the company says flies at up to 280 km/h to hunt Shaheds. Its drones serve with more than 100 units of Ukraine’s Defense Forces, from the army and the National Guard to military intelligence, the Air Force, and the border guard, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

Ukrainian drone maker Wild Hornets is rethinking projects it is currently working on, including launching interceptors from aerial platforms, because of limits on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet. Spokesman Mike Orliuk told The War Zone (TWZ) this on 20 October. The company builds Sting interceptors, which it says destroyed over 15,000 Shaheds and Gerberas, a cheaper Shahed lookalike, in a year. Orliuk said Sting’s current operations are unaffected.

The stakes rise as Russia shifts to faster drones. Ukrainian defense technology adviser Serhii Beskrestnov counted more than 2,500 jet-powered Gerans, Russia’s version of the Shahed, in August. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 16 October that these drones fly faster than 400 km/h. He added that some Ukrainian interceptors chasing them work through Starlink. When the link was slowed, Ukraine could not intercept some of them, he said.

How Sting stays connected

“Our own communications system provides the basic connection to our interceptors,” Orliuk said. The company’s remote-control technology can draw on various internet sources, he added, though the military often uses Starlink. Even then, the terminal does not need to move at high speed. It only links the command center to a ground station, which Orliuk compared to a cell tower.

“For these needs, everything is operating normally with Starlink at the moment,” he said.

An air-launch project under review

“Some drones carry a terminal on board and need to fly at high speed with it,” Orliuk said. “In such cases, Starlink’s limitations make their operation impossible.”

That is why the company is rethinking the air-launch project. Wild Hornets has made no clear decision yet but will test alternatives, Orliuk said. He declined to describe them.

“I believe, in any case, depending on a single solution is very risky,” he said.

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Other firms share the concern

Orliuk said he has spoken with other companies that rely far more on Starlink and have expressed concerns. He pointed to growing interest in Europe’s Eutelsat network, though “creating something like Starlink won’t be easy.”

Who ordered the slowdown remains unclear. The order to slow Ukraine’s Starshield service came from inside the White House, two US officials and a Western official said. A US official told TWZ the president never made such a request. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on 17 October that the slowdown had “nothing to do with the White House” and called “a report on that” “categorically false,” without saying which report he meant.

A Ukrainian drone maker just got its own air defense unit, and says it has already downed Russian jet-powered drones. Ukraine's Defense Ministry has issued an order granting the Night Hornets, the anti-Shahed unit of interceptor maker Wild Hornets, the status of a private air defense, and the company announced it is starting to build its own network of remotely launched interceptor drones.

Russia has sharply increased its use of jet-powered Shahed drones, which cuts the reaction time of Ukraine's mobile fire groups from about a minute to as little as six seconds. Now, a private company joins the air defense line, while Ukrainian military intelligence says Russia is producing up to 500 Geran-4 and Geran-5 jet drones a month.

The planned network will combine remote-control centers, a grid of remote interceptor launches built on the company's Hornet Vision Ctrl technology, and field positions. Wild Hornets will not sell protection for individual sites and will pay for the unit from drone sales profit.

"The unit has more than 50 downed Shaheds to its name, including jet-powered ones. We create technologies that work. We use them ourselves to protect our country," the company says.

Air Force commanders will direct the crews

The crews already go on daily combat duty alongside the military and will take orders from the Air Force command. The unit draws on Wild Hornets instructors and test pilots, including veterans of the war and pilots who rose from beginners to instructors. The company wants to fold private air defense into the country's overall system, including over Kyiv.

Air alerts now swallow nearly a third of mall hours

Due to Russia's jet-powered drones, air-raid alerts covered 30.8 percent of shopping-center operating hours across Ukraine in September, a record, up from 22 percent in August and 14.1 percent a year earlier, the Ukrainian Council of Shopping Centers reports. The average mall has now lost 176.5 working days since the full-scale invasion, including 9.6 in September alone.

Kyiv shows the sharpest jump. The share of alert time during mall hours in the capital rose from 11.6 percent in August to 32.7 percent in September, the council said.

The damage reaches well beyond the malls. Ukraine's Economy Ministry expects losses from Russian strikes to reach up to $10 billion this year, Economy Minister Oleksandr Kravchenko said on 12 September.