The price of listening¶

By 2026 a drone can be heard from the ground by anyone who buys the right box, and the boxes are for sale. None of them was built for Europe, and the Commission is now buying. The prices were set at a front where a drone is lost by the thousand a day.

The front has a budget¶

The Vydun, the FC.K and the D-JACK were built for Ukraine’s front. The Anti-Shahed hackathon of June 2023 put fifty teams in front of the security services and gave three manufacturers a million dollars each, so that air-defence resources were not wasted on Shahed drones.

The Jammer Hackathon of December 2024, run by the Brave1 cluster and the D3 fund, gathered more than seventy people in twenty-five teams for three days. It paid $20,000 for the best suppression of control and video links, $10,000 for a reactive jammer called FORT, and $7,000 each for FPV video detection and spoofing, a control-channel detection algorithm and a direction-finding system.

Militarnyi counted more than fifty Ukrainian manufacturers working on more than a hundred electronic-warfare and electronic-intelligence systems. By March 2026 dozens of Vydun 7.5 units had been at the front for four months, after three months of development and testing, and their firmware was updated remotely.

Europe discovers the timetable¶

The Commission wants the same three months for Europe. Its action plan of 11 February 2026 names a Drone Alliance with Ukraine as a route to affordable counter-drone technology and rapid mass production, and names Horizon Europe, the European Defence Fund, the European Defence Industry Programme and SAFE loans as the money it can draw on.

Commissioner Brunner said the Commission is mobilising €400 million from the Border Management and Visa Instrument this year for Member States to buy drone and counter-drone technology, and a Counter-Drone Centre of Excellence is to open in 2027.

The apprentices arrive¶

The EUDIS hackathon has 2026 winners from eight countries, and its 2025 and 2026 winners include a laser that dazzles a drone’s camera, a 0 to 50 metre optical and LiDAR system, a rooftop interceptor, and a sensor grid trained on 20,000 recordings, and a team from Cartagena entered a jammer built from low-cost parts, among them a domestic microwave oven and hand-made antennae.

The invoice is the easy bit¶

Some of that market is cheap. The Rzeszow mesh is microphones, cheap radios and a model on each node. Contra-drone advertises the D-JACK at $2,300. MAVSploit is open source and runs on a laptop against a MAVLink autopilot. Babai lists its Vydun detectors at 31,000 to 49,000 hryvnia, the 7.5 at 39,000. The Rzeszow write-up lists what the mesh does not measure, down to the false-positive figures it lacks. The Commission’s plan lists what the European picture will integrate. Neither mentions what is stored of what was heard, or for how long.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-25.