Just recently Defense Express asked Infozahyst company about its progress with Gekata ELINT airborne system, an ambitious project aiming to equip an aerial drone with an "AWACS" capability of spotting enemy radars.
As it turns out, this Ukrainian-based company, specializing in development of electronic warfare and intelligence systems, has also been quietly developing a ground-based and more powerful alternative which was named Archont, an Infozahyst employee Anton Shcherbakov wrote in a column for DOU.ua.
The video below shows the workshop where antennas for Archont systems are manufactured.
Ukrainian Defense Forces, he notes, need compact-sized electronic intelligence systems because larger ones are priority targets for russian invasion forces. The russians invest an extensive amount of resources, including high-precision weapons and attack drones, to put them out of order.
For that reason, Infozahyst decided to create a mobile ground-based ELINT complex that can optionally be deployed as a stationary system. The project is called Archont, and according to the company representative, has a more powerful antenna than its airborne iteration, with an operational frequency range extended to receive low frequency signals.
Archont system consists of multiple posts, of which either one can perform the role of the main control center, these posts are interconnected into a direction-finding network that works in a passive mode so that the enemy cannot locate it.
Here's an illustration: Khortytsia-M is an Infozahyst's product with a similar concept
All software is created domestically, it can perform various tasks, including signal processing, identification, and classification. Elements of artificial intelligence, integrated into the system, help the operator to link the signals to their sources and "facilitate the process of accomplishing tasks," Anton Shcherbakov explains.
Archont has already helped Ukrainian military to catch signals emitted by russian equipment, he states and listed out some of them:
- air surveillance radars: 1L117 radars, 96L6E radars of the S-300 air defense systems, and radars used by Tor-M1 air defense systems;
- "numerous surface targets in the waters of the Black Sea;"
- air targets: M402 Pika-M radar on the Su-34, N011R Bars radar on the Su-30.
Infozahyst assures that Ukrainian forces will be much more effective at finding and destroying valuable russian assets if saturated with enough Archont systems. The targets it is designed to counter are not just expensive to replace but also take a lot of time and effort to reinstall which can open windows for successful military operations:
"If a significant number of them is destroyed, it may become a turning point of the war since it will enable out air force to gain air superiority," Shcherbakov summed up.
Read more: Ukraine's Radar Hunter Gekata ELINT Drone Tested, Needs Improvement, Company Says
