Bukovel-AD

Ukraine's home-grown drone-killer — the Bukovel-AD, built by the Ukrainian firm Proximus — is a counter-UAV electronic-warfare system that quietly listens for enemy drones out to as much as 100 km, then jams the radio link to their operators and the satellite-navigation signals they fly by inside roughly 20 km. It was developed specifically to defeat Russia's Orlan-10 — the same drone that carries the Leer-3 cellular-EW payload — making it the Ukrainian counter-punch to a core Russian capability, and it has since become one of Kyiv's anti-drone exports.

Overview

Bukovel-AD is a mobile counter-unmanned-aircraft system (C-UAS) that pairs passive detection with active jamming. A passive radio-frequency sensor detects and direction-finds drones at long range without emitting (so it is hard to locate), per Wikipedia and euro-sd; when a UAV closes in, the system jams the command-and-control data link between drone and operator and suppresses its satellite-navigation reception. It can block GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, and per the Ukrspecexport brochure also VOR/DME aviation navigation, against UAV classes from nano and micro up to medium and loitering munitions, in a 24/7 operating mode. Militarnyi notes it can also generate false navigation signals — spoofing as well as jamming — to confuse a drone into landing or going off course.

Development

Bukovel-AD is produced by Proximus LLC, a Ukrainian company, and was first supplied to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2016 — born directly out of the Donbas drone war. As Janes records, it "was developed specifically to counter the Orlan-10 UAV" that Russia uses as a reconnaissance and EW asset. Since then it has been iteratively upgraded — wider frequency coverage, better detection range, and compatibility with more satellite-navigation constellations — to keep pace with evolving Russian drones. The system is modular in mounting: it can ride on light off-road vehicles for mobility or be set up on tripods and fixed installations to defend a static site. It is now marketed for export through Ukrspecexport, part of Ukraine's emergence as a counter-drone supplier.

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