Watchdog

Watchdog is a radio-frequency sensor designed to detect, classify, and direction-find small unmanned aircraft, built by Danish counter-drone specialist MyDefence and introduced in its current form around 2020. Where the company’s body-worn Wingman series is meant for the dismounted soldier, Watchdog is the static and vehicle-mounted half of the line — a node intended to sit on a mast, a building roof, or a light tactical vehicle and watch a sector of airspace continuously rather than the few hundred metres a body-worn unit can cover.

The system listens across the radio bands that consumer and military-grade drones use for command, control, and video downlink, comparing what it hears against a library of known waveforms to identify the model of aircraft and, in many cases, the controller. Multiple Watchdog units networked together provide direction-of-arrival fixes that can be triangulated into a position, feeding a common operating picture that MyDefence’s effectors and partner jammers can act on. The sensor is passive — it does not radiate — which keeps it survivable against signals-intelligence collection and lets it operate inside electronic-warfare environments that would blind active radar. Detection of low, slow, small targets that traditional air-defence radars routinely miss is the point of the design.

Watchdog has been procured by the United States, where MyDefence equipment entered the US Army inventory through the Joint Counter-small UAS Office’s qualified-products list and has been bought in successive tranches for forward-deployed units. Denmark fields it natively, and the United Kingdom has adopted it as part of its layered counter-UAS effort. The Danish government has been a vocal donor of MyDefence systems to Ukraine, where the operational pressure of Russian Lancet, Shahed, and quadcopter activity has effectively turned the Donbas into a live-fire testbed for the entire counter-drone industry; Watchdog and its Wingman siblings are among the systems that have been validated there.

Development has tracked the threat. MyDefence has steadily expanded the frequency coverage and the signal library to keep pace with new commercial drone radios, fibre-optic-controlled FPVs that emit nothing at all, and improvised Russian and Iranian designs. The company’s broader stack — Wingman 103 for the dismount, Watchdog for the static or mobile node, and the Pitbull jammer — is sold as an integrated kit, with Watchdog usually positioned as the cueing sensor for the rest.

In a crowded counter-drone field dominated by larger primes selling radar-led solutions, MyDefence’s pitch is the opposite: small, passive, networked RF nodes that scale by quantity rather than capability per unit. Watchdog is the workhorse of that approach.