Chinese-made antennae are helping Russia’s exploding Shahed drones counter Ukraine’s electronic warfare more effectively, per Ukrainian reports.
The devices are Controlled Reception Pattern Antennae, or CRPA, which are advanced systems that protect against signal jamming or spoofing — when a fake GPS signal is sent to a drone to make it go off-course.
Ukraine has reported since January that the Chinese antennae were being found in Shaheds. Vladyslav Vlasiuk, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said at the time that the devices were likely originally made for agriculture.
But a popular radio tech specialist in Ukraine, Sergey “Flash” Beskrestnov, said on Friday that a Shahed was found last week with the most advanced Chinese anti-jamming device yet.
He posted a photo of a circular dish with 16 elements, which are the parts of an antenna that handle signals. The devices found in January, in comparison, had eight elements.
An antenna with more elements typically helps drones deal with higher-powered jammers and more spoofing signals simultaneously.
“This is the first recorded instance of its use,” Beskrestnov wrote.
Col. Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force, addressed the tech changes during a broadcast by local channel ICTV on Monday.
“If there were previously eight channels, now there are 16, which means our electronic warfare systems must suppress them,” he said in Ukrainian.
Ihnat said Ukraine would have to respond by surging the number of electronic warfare systems it’s deploying.
“The more antennas the drone has, the more suppression systems we need. That is what the serious efforts of our military-industrial complex are focused on, along with assistance from partners and organizations,” he said.
Iran-designed Shahed drones are not typically known to incorporate Chinese anti-jamming antennae. Russia has a 12-element military antenna, the Kometa, which Ukraine also said it found on a Shahed drone in February.
The appearance of Chinese devices on Russia’s exploding drones could provide clues as to how Moscow’s military-industrial base is dealing with Western sanctions that have sought to cut off the supply of vital electronic parts for its weapons development.
Ukraine says the sanctions haven’t fully walled Russia off. In November, it said Moscow was deploying decoy drones fitted with Western-made components such as transceivers.
Meanwhile, Russia has been trying to scale up its own production of long-range attack drones modeled after the Shahed, which it’s relied on heavily for strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and air defenses. One version of these devices is the Geran-2, which is similar to the winged Shahed-136.
In July, Bloomberg reported that European officials said Russian and Chinese companies were partnering together to develop another such drone.
Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a comment request sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
