DZYNE’s new vehicle kit finds drone operators up to 34 km away

A drone pilot operating somewhere in the Washington D.C. area recently had no idea he’d been found, until a military police vehicle with a small detection kit on its roof had already pinpointed his location, pulled his grid coordinates, and displayed them on a tablet inside the cabin. The system that did it was DZYNE Technologies’ DTI, and it found him 17.9 kilometers away.

The Detect Track and Identify kit (DTI) is a radio frequency detection system that listens for the communications link between a drone and its operator, identifies the signal, determines its direction, and where terrain and signal conditions allow, calculates exactly where the operator is standing. Mounted on the roof of a military police vehicle and paired with a tablet display inside the cabin, it gave the crew the drone pilot’s Military Grid Reference System coordinates in real time — a result that Adam E. Wirth, Business Development Manager for Products and Training for the U.S. Army and Air Force at DZYNE Technologies, described publicly as “damn impressive.” The GCS — ground control station — is the radio transmitter the pilot uses to fly the drone. Finding it means finding the person holding it, which is exactly the problem that counter-drone teams around sensitive government facilities have been trying to solve for years.

Beyond detection, the DTI carries a built-in spectrum analysis tool, can download detailed detection reports, and incorporates AI-assisted identification capability. Pairing it with DZYNE’s Dronebuster jamming system creates a detect-then-defeat sequence that reflects how these systems are actually deployed together in the field — the DTI locates the threat and the operator, the Dronebuster cuts the control link. According to Wirth, the two systems working together successfully detected and defeated multiple targets over several days of operations near Washington at what he described as high operational tempo, with military police vehicles serving as the mobile platform for both.

That vehicle integration is the focus of DZYNE’s Autonomous Vehicle Kit (AVK), a slew-to-cue system the company recently began shipping that integrates the directional jammer and detection hardware onto essentially any vehicle type. The standard configuration produces approximately a 14-kilometer detection diameter bubble around the vehicle. Geolocation detections routinely exceed that figure depending on terrain and electromagnetic conditions — DZYNE has recorded a geolocation at 34 kilometers under real-world operational conditions, a range that gives commanders warning time measured in minutes rather than seconds and fundamentally changes how a base security force can respond to an inbound threat.

Thirty-four kilometers is a striking number for a vehicle-mounted counter-drone system. Most detection hardware marketed to military customers measures its realistic operational range in single digits under typical field conditions, where buildings, terrain, and competing radio frequency noise compress what the physics theoretically allows. The fact that the DTI achieved that range outside a controlled test environment — against a real signal, under real conditions — is the kind of performance data that procurement offices and base security planners pay close attention to.

The directional jammer at the heart of the AVK configuration also raises a tactical question that the counter-drone community is actively working through. A directional jammer concentrates its output toward a specific target rather than broadcasting in all directions, which raises the question of whether it produces a smaller detectable signature for enemy RF detection systems than an omnidirectional alternative — and what that difference looks like plotted on a spectrum heat map. It is the next layer of the problem: not just defeating drones, but doing it in ways that don’t immediately reveal your own position to whoever is monitoring the electromagnetic environment on the other side.

The National Capital Region has become one of the most operationally active environments for counter-drone work in the United States. Incursions over military installations and sensitive government facilities have occurred with enough regularity that dedicated detection and jamming capability has become a standard element of the security posture rather than an emergency response measure called up when something goes wrong. Running that capability from mobile military police vehicles — platforms that can reposition as the threat picture changes rather than covering a fixed radius from a static sensor — is a practical answer to a threat that doesn’t stay in one place and doesn’t announce itself in advance.