{"id":50720,"date":"2026-05-19T04:32:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T04:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/russia-was-facing-monthslong-delays-in-anti-jam-antennas-now-its-putting-them-on-foam-decoys-for-shaheds\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T04:32:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T04:32:23","slug":"russia-was-facing-monthslong-delays-in-anti-jam-antennas-now-its-putting-them-on-foam-decoys-for-shaheds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/russia-was-facing-monthslong-delays-in-anti-jam-antennas-now-its-putting-them-on-foam-decoys-for-shaheds\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia was facing monthslong delays in anti-jam antennas. Now it&#8217;s putting them on foam decoys for Shaheds."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6a0bd05becd7cc1332bb0f24?format=jpeg\" alt=\"A Gerbera is seen on display at a Ukrainain booth in 2025.\"\/><figcaption>Gerberas, such as the one seen here, are typically decoys for Russia&#039;s version of the Shahed attack drone.<\/p>\n<p>Danylo Antoniuk\/Ukrinform\/NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Ukraine is finding advanced antennas on Russia&#039;s low-priority foam and plywood Gerbera drones.<\/li>\n<li>A top drone advisor said it&#039;s a sign Russia has surged production of the anti-jamming component.<\/li>\n<li>That&#039;s just after Russia was facing a three-to-five-month wait for these antennas last year, he said.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ukrainian troops are finding advanced antennas with stronger anti-jamming features on Russian decoy drones, a sign that the Kremlin is overcoming a shortage of the key component.<\/p>\n<p>Serhii &quot;Flash&quot; Beskrestnov, a prominent Ukrainian drone analyst, posted photos to social media on Wednesday of a downed delta-wing Gerbera drone and a 12-element Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Recently, 12-element Kometa antennas have begun to appear on the Gerberas,&quot; wrote Beskrestnov, who is the Ukrainian defense minister&#039;s advisor on battle drone tech.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;For me, this is a sign that the plant that produces Kometa has increased its production capacity. A year ago, there were not enough Kometas even for KABs,&quot; he added, referring to Russian precision glide bombs. &quot;There was a three-to-five-month queue at the plant.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Antennas with more elements are generally more resistant to electronic warfare, one of Ukraine&#039;s main ways to disrupt or take down incoming drones. More basic versions of the Kometa, Russia&#039;s family of anti-jamming antennas, have four- or eight-element arrays.<\/p>\n<p>That a Russian Gerbera would be equipped with a 12-element antenna is significant. Moscow typically uses Gerberas as decoys to absorb Ukrainian air defense munitions hunting down the Geran-2, Russia&#039;s domestically produced analog of the Iranian Shahed-136 long-range attack drone.<\/p>\n<p>Often made of foam or plywood, the Gerbera is more expendable than the Geran-2, which has an estimated price of between $35,000 and $80,000 each. Gerberas cost about $10,000 each to make, Ukrainian officials estimated in 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Though Russia has, more recently, been seen equipping Gerberas with small warheads or using them as scouting tools, the propeller-driven drones are typically considered distractions or low-priority targets.<\/p>\n<p>Beskrestnov wrote that Russia has traditionally saved heavily on costs for the Gerbera, initially launching them without jamming protection at all.<\/p>\n<p>It later began fitting cheaper, Iranian four-element antennas to the drones, he added.<\/p>\n<p>Russia sometimes equips its attack drones with even more advanced, 16-element antennas \u2014 including some of Chinese make \u2014 but Beskrestnov said on Wednesday that these were still being reserved for &quot;important products.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, Kyiv said it used its homegrown Flamingo missiles to strike a production facility for anti-jamming antennas, the VNIIR-Progress complex in the Russian city of Cheboksary, about 600 miles from the Ukrainian border.<\/p>\n<p>The plant has regularly come under attack from long-range Ukrainian drones in the past year, with at least four separate reported strikes in 2024. The extent of any lasting damage to the facility, however, is unclear.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gerberas, such as the one seen here, are typically decoys for Russia&#039;s version of the Shahed attack drone. Danylo Antoniuk\/Ukrinform\/NurPhoto via Getty Images Ukraine is finding advanced antennas on Russia&#039;s low-priority foam and plywood Gerbera drones. A top drone advisor said it&#039;s a sign Russia has surged production of the anti-jamming component. That&#039;s just after [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50721,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-50720","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}