AIRFENCE Mobile

AIRFENCE Mobile is the transportable variant of Sensofusion’s AIRFENCE counter-unmanned aircraft system, packaged for crews who need to stand up drone detection at a temporary site rather than wire it into a fixed perimeter. The Finnish vendor introduced the mobile configuration in 2019, building on the same passive radio-frequency sensor that anchors the company’s fixed installations at airports, prisons, and critical infrastructure across Europe and North America. In its vehicle-mounted form it bolts to a 4x4 or light tactical truck; in its man-portable form it rides in a backpack with a folding antenna assembly. Setup is measured in minutes rather than days, which is the entire point.

The sensor at the core is the same one that does the work in the fixed product. AIRFENCE listens for the radio links between a drone and its controller, classifies the protocol against a signature library the company maintains, and triangulates both the airframe and the pilot. Because the receiver is passive, it does not emit and is not itself locatable by an opposing electronic-warfare picture. The library covers commercial off-the-shelf airframes — the DJI family in particular — as well as a growing list of military and modified-commercial control links seen in Ukraine and the Middle East. Operators see tracks on a tablet or laptop client that runs the same software stack as the fixed installations, so a unit can move between a static site and a convoy without retraining. Where the rules of engagement allow it, the system can also push a takeover or jamming effector against an identified link rather than only reporting it.

Finland is the publicly acknowledged military operator, and the system has appeared in Finnish Defence Forces exercises and infrastructure-protection demonstrations. Sensofusion has also marketed the mobile variant to NATO members and to event-security customers protecting summits, motorcades, and large public gatherings, where the requirement is a few days of coverage at a venue that does not normally need a counter-drone fence. The company has not published unit numbers, and most national customers do not disclose their inventories of RF counter-UAS gear.

The mobile AIRFENCE sits in a crowded segment alongside other passive-RF systems such as DroneShield’s DroneSentry-X and CRFS’s RFeye Site, and competes on the breadth of its protocol library and the fact that the same software runs across fixed, mobile, and dismounted form factors. For a Finnish armed force that has spent the past several years studying Russian drone employment at close range, having a sensor that fits in a backpack is not a small thing.