Tethered counter-UAS · fibre-optic threat layer
Fibre-guided drones fly straight through every jammer you own. North Defence stops listening for a signal that was never transmitted — and starts looking for the ten kilometres of glass the operator cannot fly without.
01 — The gap
A fibre-optic FPV drone is not a harder version of the drone you already defeat. It is a different problem: it removed every emission your defences are built to find.
Guidance and video run down a hair-thin optical fibre unspooling behind the airframe. There is no control link to detect, jam, spoof or take over. Every RF-defeat system in the inventory is blind to it by design, not by failure.
The route is flown by a human at the far end of the wire, watching the nose camera in real time. No waypoints, no satnav dependency, no geofence to enforce. Spoofing a receiver that isn't in the loop changes nothing.
A 30 cm airframe flying at 40 m above ground level, terrain-masked behind relief, returns almost nothing. Ground-based radar sees the ridge. By the time the target clears it, the engagement window is measured in seconds.
It beats the whole stack — and it is physically tied to a ten-kilometre line of glass.
That fibre is not an accessory. It is the guidance system. The drone cannot drop it, cannot shorten it, and cannot fly without it. It is the one part of the threat that is guaranteed to be there, and the one part that is enormous.
02 — The principle
A quadcopter at range is a handful of pixels — statistically indistinguishable from a bird, a bag, or sensor noise. Detectors that hunt for it drown in false positives.
The fibre is the exact opposite kind of object. It is continuous, near-perfectly straight, and long enough to cross the entire sensor frame. That is the easiest thing in computer vision to isolate: you are no longer classifying a blob, you are fitting a line through thousands of correlated pixels. Noise does not form lines. Birds do not form lines.
And a line has two ends. The near end is the aircraft you have to shoot down in the next few seconds. The far end is the launch team you can hand to fires at your leisure.
03 — The system
A helium aerostat carries the eye above the terrain that hides the threat. The shooters ride with it. A directed-energy mount sits behind the anchor for everything that comes close enough to burn. Select a component to inspect it.
04 — Simulator
Set the threat range, pick an effector and commit. The engagement plays out from first contact to launch-point cue — sensor view included. Drag the stage to take the camera.
05 — Numbers
Sensor altitude, detect-to-defeat, magazine and standoff are illustrative concept figures — chosen to size the system, not derived from test data or from a fielded article. Line detection range is the exception: 8 km is the output of the detection model, at a fibre contrast of 0.16.
06 — Deployment
A single site sees a wide arc of the approach corridor because the sensor is above the relief that hides the threat from the ground. Sites overlap along a border so a target crossing the seam is held by two line fits at once.
Anchor, winch, shelter, generator and the laser mount move on a single towed platform. Setup is a crew task, not an engineering task.
North Defence handles the class of threat the RF layer cannot see. It publishes tracks and launch-point cues into the same picture rather than replacing it.
A laser engagement costs power. A kinetic round costs a fraction of an interceptor built for aircraft. The attacker is spending more per drone than the defender is spending per kill.
07 — The company
North Defence is a solo company, founded and based in Israel. We build defence systems — interceptors, radars, and hardware like the system on this page — and we take on special requests outside that core, from an aircraft to a mine.
North Defence is founded and run as a solo company, based in Israel. No layer between the engineering and the decision to ship it.
The core of the business is interceptors, radars, and systems like the one on this page. The door is open to any special request beyond that — an aircraft, a mine, whatever the problem actually is.
We are not playing with a soldier's safety to protect a margin. If a product is not good enough to trust with someone's life, it does not ship — whatever that costs us.
Have an idea? We will hear it — and if it ships, you earn a cut.
Every idea gets a real look, whoever it comes from. Send it to us — if we take it to production, you get a share of what it makes. Contact details are being set up.
Next step
The engagement above is driven by a parameterised model — ranges, closing speeds, effector selection and standoff are all inputs. Bring the profile you actually face and it can be run against the design envelope to show you where it breaks. Contact details are being set up.