How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?
Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.
A faraday foil layer will save electronics and shielded cable runs will block air induced pulses. Wired motor coils will tolerate, and fiber optic are immune.
You can even control via IR data using a bidirectional LED with a faraday copper window screen protecting the electronics. The police use a microwave car stopper that uses pulsed EMI.
Just new armor = new chinks = the race continues.
They make conductive spray paint for this sort of thing [1], so it can be applied to the inside cover of electronics. Usual use is targeted application for EMI suppression.
You'll sometimes find a squirt this on the inside of consumer electronics, for a quick radiated emissions compliance fix.
There was a nice video, I've seen at some point where a "DJI Phantom 3 drone gets hit with an electrical impulse of 1.4MV - basically, a lightning strike."
And at the end, they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding...
A gutted microwave oven and a satellite tv dish have been demonstrated to disable DJI drones at ranges exceeding 500m - either having them fall out of he sky or trigger return to home. That's broadband jamming on the 2.4GHz radio frequencies though, not sending enough energy to screw with electronic (apart from the sensitive radio receiver frontends).
(This was original DJI Phantom era, so maybe 10 years or so back. I'm not aware of results of similar testing against newer DJI gear, but I doubt it'd be much different, at least for consumer DJI stuff.)
The starting cost for a drone show is around $20k USD, so it wouldn't be hard to fake what they are doing. It's hard to say if this a functioning system that can take down drone swarms, or someone is testing the market for a system that can.
It's a cool demo but I'm pretty sure if this become widely deployed, enemies would just start to wrap drones in copper tape or something to make this far less effective.
It's the real deal, lots of challenges with high emf. Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors their controllers which are using back emf to set their waveform phase get it wrong and the motors stop spinning, spin backwards, and sometimes just go back and forth like tiny washing machine motors.
Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.
Counter drone systems in battle are going to be a thing, things like the Danish 'bird' RADAR sees them easily enough[1], targeting them with EMF just needs an antenna, generator, and some clever electronics.
This becomes more important as the drones become more autonomous because if there is no operator to 'jam', electronic counter measures are not as effective.
Drone defence (detection and neutralisation) has to move fast because it’s quite asymmetric warfare (i.e drone worth $4K and take out a tank worth $30m) - over the last week for many nights Denmark’s airports and military installations has had drones disrupt air traffic and cause a lot of angst in the population and they were completely not prepared, haven’t wanted to shoot them down, and they don’t know where they’re coming from or where they’re going - scary that they’re caught so much on the back foot
They aren't on the back-foot, it's just that there's no way to minimize civilian casualties when Russia sends weapons of war into neutral civilian zones by definition. The answer becomes deny and don't engage.
This type of weapon reflects the West's approach to drone warfare—multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment that will need to be right on the front line to defend troops and positions. I'll tell you right now, it would last about 10 minutes on the front lines in Ukraine. What many people don't realize is the sheer volume of drones being used in some of the battles along the front—it's not hundreds, but thousands. Trenches are being abandoned, and everyone is going underground. Ground drones can’t even be sent in to support front line troops anymore, as vehicles are taken out within minutes. This is a weapon of last resort, to take out what gets through to the rear. We need front line solutions which don't exist yet.
Here is a quote from a piece a front line defender in the Ukrainian Arm Forces wrote. His name is Maksym Zhorin
>Equally dangerous is the technological obsolescence of NATO countries and their inability to counter modern threats. Adequacy of response, means of combat, even simply understanding what real war looks like today — all of this is missing. Therefore, even a few drones have become a problem for them.
I don't know what the solution to drones are because everything is evolving in real time.
This seems like an ideal application of the electrolaser. This was an ultraviolet laser that would ionize a channel through air and then a high voltage pulse could be sent over that channel to a target. Originally they were talking about this being like a long range taser as a non-lethal stun weapon, but maybe more suited for anti-drone technology.
I don't know why this didn't get realized in its original form. Maybe there was a practical impediment.
Speak of microwave anti-drone weapons, YouTube channel Tech Ingredients made one with microwave oven parts: https://youtu.be/V6XdcWToy2c?t=1298
At 21:38 of the video (link above is timestampped), as the drone got hit by the microwave, one side of it's motors stopped/malfunctioned, which lead to asymmetric thrust, causing the drone to flip and fall. But the drone itself seemed still functional after the fall.
Not sure how much damage Epirus’ Leonidas could cause. My opinion is, if you want to anti-drone, you need to kill it fast, faraway and complete. If the vehicle is not agile enough, the drones will just go behind you. And if a drone can total a tank with ease, that armored carrier vehicle will not survive much hits.
> "Epirus has improved on previous iterations by using Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductors to generate microwaves instead of fragile, power-hungry magnetron vacuum tubes"
Presumably this technology could also be used to make more efficient and powerful microwave ovens. Have any consumer appliance makers started using GaN semiconductors in their microwaves?
Here we have the latest Ukrainian drones resistant to Russian countermeasures.[1] There are Japanese drones able to not only survive lightning strikes, but guide them.[2]
Because the Russia-Ukraine war is so active, drones that can survive RF weapons can be expected essentially immediately. Ukraine fields a new generation of drones every three months. They have to.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 10.0 ms ] threadHow much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?
Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.
You'll sometimes find a squirt this on the inside of consumer electronics, for a quick radiated emissions compliance fix.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/stores/MGChemicals/page/0ADAC495-496D...
You can... once.
But that IR transmitter will be easily detected and destroyed.
And at the end, they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3iJjrQmEho
(This was original DJI Phantom era, so maybe 10 years or so back. I'm not aware of results of similar testing against newer DJI gear, but I doubt it'd be much different, at least for consumer DJI stuff.)
Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.
Counter drone systems in battle are going to be a thing, things like the Danish 'bird' RADAR sees them easily enough[1], targeting them with EMF just needs an antenna, generator, and some clever electronics.
This becomes more important as the drones become more autonomous because if there is no operator to 'jam', electronic counter measures are not as effective.
[1] https://www.weibelradars.com/drone-detection/
The longer pulses the in this platform seem to be a big part of delivering effect on target. Area under the curve is where the damage happens.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-25/denmark-defence-minis...
It's gray-zone warfare.
Here is a quote from a piece a front line defender in the Ukrainian Arm Forces wrote. His name is Maksym Zhorin
>Equally dangerous is the technological obsolescence of NATO countries and their inability to counter modern threats. Adequacy of response, means of combat, even simply understanding what real war looks like today — all of this is missing. Therefore, even a few drones have become a problem for them.
I don't know what the solution to drones are because everything is evolving in real time.
I don't know why this didn't get realized in its original form. Maybe there was a practical impediment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
It's an over the top promotional video that feels like it's out of movie. Must have cost them plenty to make it. It's like porn for military gear.
Fascinating to me that making content like that presumably helps them sell.
At 21:38 of the video (link above is timestampped), as the drone got hit by the microwave, one side of it's motors stopped/malfunctioned, which lead to asymmetric thrust, causing the drone to flip and fall. But the drone itself seemed still functional after the fall.
Not sure how much damage Epirus’ Leonidas could cause. My opinion is, if you want to anti-drone, you need to kill it fast, faraway and complete. If the vehicle is not agile enough, the drones will just go behind you. And if a drone can total a tank with ease, that armored carrier vehicle will not survive much hits.
Presumably this technology could also be used to make more efficient and powerful microwave ovens. Have any consumer appliance makers started using GaN semiconductors in their microwaves?
Because the Russia-Ukraine war is so active, drones that can survive RF weapons can be expected essentially immediately. Ukraine fields a new generation of drones every three months. They have to.
[1] https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-tests-new-kamikaze-drone...
[2] https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/04/japan-has-successfully-used-...
Fiber lasers can direct 10's-100's of kW of power almost continuously and with a range of several km with proper optics:
https://youtu.be/BkbVeA4Lejc
https://youtu.be/lFMvesTUjAA
https://youtu.be/eFiDYFnlp7s