3DTech

Ukrainian drone manufacturer 3DTech emerged in 2023, during the second year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, to address a specific tactical problem: radio-controlled FPV drones — the cheap one-way attack munition that came to dominate the front line — were increasingly losing their links to Russian electronic-warfare jamming. The company’s answer was a wired drone, controlled over a hair-thin optical fiber that unspools from the airframe in flight.

That product line is sold under the Khyzhak (Predator) REBOFF brand. According to 3DTech, the drones ship with fiber spools of between 10 and 20 kilometres, with longer 25- and 30-kilometre variants in development. Because the control signal travels down the fiber rather than over the air, the link cannot be jammed and emits no detectable radio signature for the receiver to home in on — the trade-offs being the physical drag of the spool, a lower top speed, and an unmistakable visible trail behind the drone that can give away the launch point to an alert observer.

The Khyzhak sits in a category that barely existed two years earlier. Fiber-optic FPVs first appeared in numbers on the Russian side in the second half of 2024, with the Knyaz Vandal Novgorodsky family becoming the most-photographed example, and Ukrainian makers — 3DTech among them — moved quickly to field their own. By late 2024 and into 2025, Ukrainian defence media were reporting fiber-optic FPV use on both sides of the front, particularly in the contested forest belts and trench networks around Kupiansk, Pokrovsk, and Toretsk where jamming density is highest.

3DTech has also disclosed work on the Predator Shooter, an interceptor variant intended to destroy enemy fiber-optic drones in flight. The company says it carries a multi-barrel 12-gauge shotgun payload — a counter-drone weapon for a target that, by design, cannot be jammed and must be brought down physically. Whether the Predator Shooter has been used operationally has not been independently confirmed.

Headcount, funding, and contract figures are not public. That opacity is typical of the small Ukrainian defence-tech firms that emerged from the war, where disclosure of either people or production capacity can itself become a targeting risk.