ADJ
STC, or Special Technology Center is among the largest defence manufacturers in Russia, showcasing both sides of the unmanned coin with its unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and systems to counter said platforms.
The company’s hard to miss main feature is its orange LUN-20 UAV, the civil version of the ORLAN-10 in use with Russia’s armed forces for a variety of missions. With a range of 1000km, the LUN-20 can remain airborne for up to 10 hours although it managed a record 16-hour flight time while completing a 660km journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow and then back. It is most commonly used by Russia’s emergency and rescue services and even for wildlife tracking. The UAV can incorporate 3 different payloads–either a gimbal camera with built-in artificial intelligence (AI), gimbal thermal imager or aerial photography module. The LUN-20 was also used to survey forest fires and the population of Russia’s endangered species in the wildlands and oceans.
In addition to its unmanned platforms portfolio, STC also highlighted their counter-UAV systems such as the FPV-Hunter detection and jamming module , Steppe GNSS-jamming or spoofing module and Filin-I portable UAV detector. Developed following the conflict in Ukraine, the FPV-Hunter works fully automatically, scanning frequency ranges at a minimum range of 900m to find drones with an automatic link between both modules and auto-jams detected drone frequencies. The automated functions reduce the amount of time taken to immediately counter threats.
The Steppe spoofs signals and interferes with the satellite radio navigation systems (SRNS) receivers, suppressing navigation receivers at ranges of not less than 10km. After that, the Filin-I, which is Russian for Eurasian eagle-owl. The Filin-I is the most widely used system by personnel, capable of sending notifications of incoming drone threats to a phone. It keeps track of information from detected UAVs and can be used to detect patterns and frequencies to prevent further attacks. It can be carried on-person, transported in vehicles or as a stationary device, detecting frequencies at ranges of up to 5000m.
As a major defence company in Russia, STC is also a target of drone attacks. The company’s facilities utilise their own C-UAS systems to protect its 7,000 employees from drone attacks, recording no successful attacks on its facilities since the conflict began. Civil customers of STC’s systems include crucial infrastructure sites and sensitive sites.–-shp/adj/dl (Pix:ADJ)
