U.S. Company Creates Electronic Intelligence System for Ukraine

The American company Zephr is developing a new electronic intelligence system for Ukraine. It is designed to detect interference with satellite navigation systems and is based on a cell phone network. Sean Gordman, CEO of the developer, told about this in his interview with the Defense One.

According to the developer, network-connected cell phones with special software can become a system of electronic intelligence.

How it works

"We tied these phones to drones. We put them in cars. We put them on stationary stands, and then we also did controlled experiments where we used our own jammers, so we knew their location," Gordman told Defense One.

The first goal of the developers was to test whether it was possible to detect the jamming of a satellite navigation system using a cell network. By analyzing raw data from the navigation system and cell towers using artificial intelligence, the developer successfully proved the concept by detecting instances of satellite navigation jamming. "Thanks to the computational artificial intelligence we use on the server and the sophistication of how we process most of the signals and software, instead of depending only on sensors or very expensive antenna arrays, you can make a network of mobile phones work together as one big distributed antenna," the developer explained.

The company is currently working on not only detecting interference, but also triangulating their positions so that the source of the interference can be neutralized. To do this, new computational algorithms will analyze the power, location, and direction of the interference. Although, according to the developer, this system will not replace real military systems for detecting and searching for jammers.

But it is a solution that can be deployed quickly and cheaply. Recently, Militarnyi reported that Ukraine has created a distributed network of sound sensors to detect Russian drones and cruise missiles (Zvook), according to General James Hecker, Commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe and U.S.

Air Forces Africa and the Commander of the Allied Air Command. The airspace monitoring network, consisting of thousands of acoustic sensors across the country, has proven to be highly effective in helping to detect and track Russian drones at low altitudes. "Ukraine had to improvise to track numerous objects.

The microphones were placed so that they could determine the direction of the drones," Hecker said.