Page 8 - UKRRptJul24

Ukraine's Armed Forces dedicated to drones, on February 6. It will reportedly focus on creating special drone-specific units, increasing production, ramping up training, and pushing innovations.
From a human height, the radio signal reaches the drone in a straight line for a maximum range of 7 kilometres. To be able to "see" the copter at a distance of at least 15 kilometres, the operator needs to reach a height of 2-3 metres. But even this does not always help because the physical theory faces the limits of a specific terrain if the drone flies over hills or forests and loses the signal.
"And then we came up with the idea to make a drone on a wire, fly it and see what's happening at the checkpoints, and see the whole map of the battlefield. We started tinkering with the drone on the wire. It was completely different from what we are doing now.
The batteries in the drone deliver a huge current, 200 amps each. To transmit such a crazy current through the wire to the copter, you need a huge voltage. We had to transmit thousands of watts up the wire. It's like a big generator. But how efficient is it?", one of the developers of the Vampire recalls in a conversation with UP.
The Vampire and Nemesis teams chose to integrate the Starlink satellite communication system, which Elon Musk had just given the Ukrainian Defence Forces access to, into the drone.
An idea to set up a Starlink terminal solved the radio horizon problem. The distance between the operator and the drone mattered no more. The first drone that employed satellite communication was manufactured around May 2022.
The engineers who stayed to work on UAVs soon created Lazar, one of the first attack UAVs that showed promise.
At the same time, the Vampire team took an entirely different path. Instead of integrating foreign, albeit cutting-edge technologies, they focused on creating a fully autonomous drone.
Their first attack UAVs made their way into the army not through the General Staff or command, but from the grassroots level of soldiers who took the initiative and began to use these drones extensively.
The manufacturers worked with various businesses that initially bought Mavic and Matrice drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces and then increasingly purchased the larger attack UAVs.
The main achievement of Ukrainian attack UAVs on the battlefield is that they pushed the Russian equipment away from the front line. The buffer zone, where Russian tanks or other armoured vehicles do not stay overnight, has expanded by tens of kilometres.
In the fight against Russian armoured vehicles at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Javelin, NLAW, and Stuhna anti-tank missile systems set the tone. The comfortable operating range for all the mentioned anti-tank guided missiles is 2–3 kilometres. However, the word
8 UKRAINE Country Report July 2024 www.intellinews.com