Russia Expands Drone Antenna Arrays to Defeat Ukrainian Jamming

Russian Shahed drones flying over Kyiv are now carrying 32-element Kometa antenna arrays — the largest version yet of a satellite-navigation receiver built to survive Ukrainian jamming. The arrays are made by VNIIR-Progress, and they are the latest step in an arms race measured in antenna elements: each new version can suppress more jamming sources at once, and each one forces Ukraine to find a new answer. More than 100,000 Kometa modules have been ordered this year, and they are going into drones, missiles and guided bombs alike.

How the arrays grew

A Kometa module is a patch-antenna array: a flat grid of small antenna elements that work together to receive satellite navigation signals while rejecting interference from other directions. The more elements in the grid, the more jamming sources it can cancel — each element gives the receiver another degree of freedom to steer a null toward an incoming jammer. Ukraine first faced 16-element arrays, fielded at scale. Then came 20-element versions, now in serial production. The 32-element array found on a Shahed over Kyiv is the biggest yet — and it was assembled from two 16-element arrays, each tuned to a different satellite-navigation band. The production numbers show how seriously Russia takes the design: more than 100,000 modules ordered in 2026, for drones, missiles and guided bombs.

Where Kometa shows up

Kometa is not only a drone component. Ukrainian military intelligence lists the module in Geran drones — the Russian name for the Shahed — and in glide-bomb kits, the Iskander-M ballistic missile, the Kinzhal hypersonic missile and the Filin cruise missile. That spread is the point: one navigation receiver, hardened against jamming, can be fitted to almost anything that flies and needs to know where it is. For Ukraine’s electronic warfare units, that means the same countermeasure problem appears across the whole Russian arsenal, not just in one weapon — and every new platform that carries Kometa extends the problem a little further.

Why more elements are hard to beat

Serhii Beskrestnov, known by the call sign Flash and an adviser to President Zelenskyy, put the problem plainly: more elements means more electronic warfare sources suppressed at once. He added that it is easier for Russia to add antenna elements than it is for Ukraine to add electronic warfare sites. Each new jamming station takes time, money, power and a crew; each new antenna element is a small piece of hardware on a production line. That asymmetry is the heart of the contest. Ukraine can jam one band, or one direction, and the array adapts; the array only has to survive, while the jammer has to be everywhere.

The counters Ukraine is working on

Ukraine is working on two answers. The first is to jam more than one satellite band at the same time — L1 together with L2 or L5 — so that an array tuned to one band still loses its fix on the others. The second is spoofing: a network of devices that feed a drone false coordinates, making it believe it is somewhere it is not. The Fly Group Ukraine and analyst Anatolii Khrapchynskyi are among those working on that approach. And the Ukrainians are studying the hardware itself: the commander of the Night Watch unit, known as Alkhimik, bought a recovered 32-element antenna and examined how it was built — two 16-element arrays, each for a different satellite-navigation band, joined into one unit.

Why it matters

The Kometa story is a reminder that electronic warfare is a race, not a solution. Every jammer invites a better antenna, and every antenna invites a better jammer. Arrays like Kometa also raise the cost of the defence: every new generation of hardened navigation forces defenders to buy more jamming sites, more bands and more power. For anyone in counter-drone or drone mitigation work, the lesson is to plan for multi-band threats: single-band jamming is already being engineered around, and the next generation of targets will expect it. Drone detection has to find the threat first, and drone jamming has to cover the bands the threat actually uses — including the satellite bands it navigates by.

Source: Common Defense