Warbirds Upgrades Soika and Halka Drones for Jam-Resistant, GPS-Free Flight

Ukrainian drone maker Warbirds has upgraded two of its reconnaissance drones, Soika and Halka, to keep flying when the enemy is trying to jam them — and to keep navigating when satellite signals are gone. The changes are a direct answer to the electronic warfare fight over the front line, where the side that can still see and still steer wins. Both aircraft now carry new antennas, new navigation and better sensors, and both are built to finish their missions even if their link to the operator goes dead.

Halka: wideband antennas and frequency hopping

Halka’s upgrade starts with its antennas. The drone now carries wideband antennas that can work across a broad range of frequencies, and its radio link hops between frequencies in a pseudo-random pattern. That makes the aircraft much harder to jam: an electronic warfare station has to cover the whole band at once, instead of sitting on a single frequency and waiting. In one three-hour frontline flight, Halka went about 20 seconds without telemetry — a short gap in a long mission, and a sign of how well the link holds up under interference. For a reconnaissance drone, those seconds matter: every gap is a moment when the operator cannot see what the aircraft sees.

Soika: swapping antennas and flying on its own

Soika takes a different approach to the same problem. Its antennas are interchangeable, and the crew fits the right antenna for the band they expect to use before takeoff. If the control channel is suppressed in flight, Soika does not need the operator to bring it home: it can fly its mission and return on its own, carrying back the photographs and data it collected. That kind of autonomy changes the calculation for electronic warfare. Jamming the link no longer guarantees the drone is lost — it just means the drone is flying without supervision until it comes back.

Flying without satellites

Both aircraft are also learning to navigate without satellite signals. Soika and the Halka Mk2 and Mk3 now use radio-beacon navigation, fixing their position from ground-based beacons instead of GPS. They back that up with odometry and visual navigation, measuring their own movement and reading the ground below them. It is a layered answer to satellite jamming: no single source of position is trusted on its own, and the aircraft can keep its bearings when the sky goes quiet. In a war where GPS is jammed almost everywhere it matters, that is no longer a luxury — it is a requirement for any reconnaissance drone that expects to come home.

What comes next

Warbirds is still working on both aircraft. Soika and the Halka Mk2 are moving to full-frame sensors for better imagery, and the Halka Mk3 is getting better optics and zoom. The company is also testing ways to detect when a drone is being intercepted, watching for signs in the optical, acoustic and radio-frequency spectra. The plans are straightforward: longer range, better photographs and video, and more automated flights — and a new long-range FPV drone, the DZYGA-17S, is already in trials, with two units flying.

Why it matters

The Warbirds upgrades show which way the contest is moving. Jamming is getting stronger, so drones are getting better at dodging it — hopping frequencies, swapping antennas, navigating without satellites. For counter-drone work, that means detection and jamming have to cover wider bands and more kinds of signals than before, because the aircraft on the other side are built to survive exactly that.

Source: LB.ua