Defense Express has obtained photos of a newly discovered new type of Shahed-136 loitering munition, taken down by Ukrainian air defense. Besides the standard equipment, the drone has a camera and a 4G wireless access point. While these novelties deserve a separate analysis, more importantly, one of the photographs features a device with all factory marks physically erased and instead, DGPS inscribed along with a series of numbers.
Most probably, this drone was equipped with a DGPS, or Differential GPS, a technology that could improve the accuracy of Shahed attacks on Ukraine.
Read more: Video of Shahed-136 Production in russia: Massive Scale But Hollow Airframes Instead of Assembled Drones
In more detail, the Differential Global Positioning System is a technology that improves the precision of locating a satellite navigation device. The DGPS is used in both military and civilian domains, for example in agricultural machinery to facilitate even and precise field operations.
Open sources also provide the following description to the working principle of the DGPS: it requires two receivers, one of them is stationary which is deployed in a spot with well-known coordinates, while the other is on the move. The data received by the former helps the mobile receiver to tune up its own navigation in real-time.
If the hypothesis about russians using DGPS on Shahed-136 is correct, then the purpose of the camera and internet access point on the same drone, originally thought to help at adjusting the current location data, becomes less clear. The camera-network unit either complements the DGPS module or duplicates it, in a sort of experimental way to find out which is better.
Besides, we should also pay attention to the equipment unit labeled ADC-PLS-002, the equipment researchers in their analyses of Shahed-136s never mentioned this component previously. Based on the inscriptions on it, we can only guess that one of its purposes is to calculate the current speed of the aerial vehicle, as we can see a Pitot tube installed that goes, possibly, into the wing.
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