Wingman

Wingman is a body-worn radio-frequency drone detector developed by MyDefence , a Danish counter-UAS specialist headquartered in Støvring. Introduced in 2018, the device gives a dismounted soldier a passive way of knowing that a small unmanned aircraft is operating nearby — typically before the operator can see or hear it. Weighing under a kilogram and worn on the chest rig or plate carrier, Wingman has become a standard kit item for several NATO infantry, special-operations and force-protection units that need to move on foot in environments saturated by hostile quadcopters and small fixed-wing drones.

The detector works by listening for the radio signatures of drone command-and-control links and video downlinks across a wide swathe of the spectrum used by commercial and military UAS. When it recognises a known signature, it classifies the threat by drone family and signals the wearer with a haptic pulse on the body and an icon on a small screen, reserving audio cues for the noisiest situations. Because the link is passive, Wingman emits nothing of its own — useful for soldiers who do not want a counter-drone tool that itself acts as a beacon. The unit can be paired over a low-power mesh with MyDefence’s vehicle-mounted detectors and with the company’s man-portable Pitbull jammer, so that a squad can build a shared picture of the drones around it and cue an effector when one is needed. Software updates extend the library of recognised waveforms as new drone types appear in the field.

Operators include the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands, and the system has appeared in deployments to Eastern Europe and the Sahel. MyDefence has stated that Wingman has been used in Ukraine, where the density of small drones above the front line has driven heavy demand for body-worn detection. The company secured a place on a US Department of Defense counter-UAS framework in the early 2020s, and Wingman has been bought through both direct contracts and NATO procurement vehicles for force protection, route security and convoy work.

The device sits in a small but growing class of soldier-portable RF detectors competing with offerings from DroneShield, CACI’s SkyTracker family and a handful of Israeli vendors. What distinguishes Wingman is its weight class and its tight integration with MyDefence’s own jammer and vehicle sensors, which lets infantry squads field a self-contained detect-and-defeat chain without reaching back to a battery-level counter-UAS cell.