Russia develops new jammer to counter FPV drone attacks

Russia’s Rostec state defense corporation has announced a new vehicle-mounted counter-FPV drone jammer of its SERP anti-drone system family, specifically designed to protect mobile assets against FPV drone attacks.

The new system, designated SERP-FPV, was developed by the Rosel holding company, a Rostec subsidiary focused on electronic warfare and radio electronics, according to the company’s announcement. The system is built around two core requirements that distinguish FPV drone defense from broader counter-UAS work: deployment speed and signal suppression effectiveness. A vehicle convoy under FPV attack has seconds to respond, not minutes, and the jammer that protects it needs to be operational the moment the vehicle is moving rather than requiring setup time before it becomes effective.

SERP-FPV operates across the most common control frequencies used by FPV drones, including civilian radio bands that commercial FPV hardware typically uses. The system generates both directional and omnidirectional jamming, giving operators the ability to focus suppression against a specific threat vector while simultaneously maintaining broader area coverage — a combination that matters when dealing with swarm attacks from multiple directions simultaneously. The 360-degree azimuth coverage the system provides is a direct response to the tactical reality of FPV attacks, which can approach from any direction and give defending crews minimal warning before impact.

The frequency coverage question is where SERP-FPV’s design philosophy becomes most interesting, and where Natalia Kotlyar, Deputy Director for Business Development at the Vector Research Institute, which operates within Rosel, was unusually direct. “These days, drone operators quite often experiment and ‘reflash’ their equipment so that it operates on ‘custom’ frequencies,” Kotlyar said in the company’s announcement. “Standard settings and solutions for electronic countermeasures will not be effective in this case. However, the SERP systems have an important feature. Even if the operator uses a ‘custom’ frequency, but it falls within the range of our anti-drone system, the signal will still be suppressed. For every clever ‘bird’ — there’s an EW system with a secret,” she said.

The cat-and-mouse dynamic between FPV drone operators and jamming systems has been one of the defining technical competitions of the war in Ukraine, where Ukrainian operators have increasingly moved away from standard commercial frequencies to custom firmware configurations that defeat jamming systems tuned to known frequency ranges. A jammer that covers a broad enough band to catch custom-programmed drones operating outside their factory defaults addresses that adaptation directly, and Kotlyar’s framing — “if it falls within the range of our anti-drone system, the signal will still be suppressed” — describes a wideband suppression approach rather than a narrowband system tuned to specific known frequencies.

SERP-FPV is designed for installation on mobile platforms including armored vehicles, which places it in the category of active vehicle protection systems rather than static base defense. Russian armored vehicles operating in Ukraine have been among the most frequently targeted assets in the conflict, with FPV drone operators developing effective tactics for attacking vehicles from above, from the sides, and from behind — directions where armor is thinnest and where vehicle crews have the least situational awareness. A system that provides 360-degree coverage while the vehicle is moving, without requiring the crew to stop and set up before it becomes operational, addresses the specific vulnerability profile that FPV drones have exploited against armored vehicles throughout the conflict.

The broader SERP system family from which SERP-FPV is derived has been positioned by Rosel as a scalable counter-drone architecture covering different threat environments and platform types. Adding a vehicle-protection variant to that lineup reflects where Russian electronic warfare development priorities have shifted as FPV drone losses have accumulated. Fixed-position jamming infrastructure can protect bases, command posts, and logistics nodes, but the vehicles moving between those positions have remained exposed during transit, and the SERP-FPV is explicitly designed to close that gap.