Advanced Protection Systems (APS) will be showing its counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS) SKYctrl at MSPO over the coming days.
“Radar technology is what we know best,” states Maciej Klemm, the CEO and joint founder of Polish Advanced Protection Systems speaking to Armada International in London a few weeks before the event.
APS was founded in 2015 as a radar and software developer and currently has 150 employees, although this is expected to rise as business has been growing. The incident of drones flying over the sensitive airspace around seven French nuclear power stations in October 2014 gave Klemm and his partner the idea of developing a counter drone system.
The founders gained their experience in numerous areas from breast cancer scanning early in Klemm’s career, through to work on ground penetrating radar. There were also contracts with the European Defence Agency (EDA) relating to radar signal processing.
As the threat from UAS climbs steeply, in military applications as see extensively in the Ukraine War, and as a threat to critical civilian infrastructure , the proprietary radar solution developed by APS has become quicker and more precise at identifying and classifying small UAS, including those that are both low and slow as well as the smaller but faster versions. The jammer can then The system can be used for force protection, ground based air defence (GBAD) and for protecting critical infrastructure.
SKYctrl has been tested with a 30mm remote control weapon from MSI-Defence, a British company, that allows UAS to be targeted and destroyed. In short, the SKYctrl can be used to jam or destroy a wide range of drones in virtually any weather condition.
One of the company’s current development projects is aimed at continuing to improve the detection of Class 1 UAS at a range of up to eight kilometres.
A containerised version comprising four radars can offer force protection over 3kms.
by Andrew Drwiega
