The last seasons of the war in Ukraine have become a laboratory for electronic warfare at scale. Massed drone barrages of Shahed-type and decoy drones have forced defenders to combine kinetic shooters with layered electronic attack and sensing. Ukrainian units routinely report that a large fraction of incoming drones are neutralized not by missiles or guns but by targeted jamming and suppression that breaks command links, disrupts GNSS, or forces loitering munitions into fail-safe behaviours.

Before we get tactical, a verification note. I was unable to find an independent, authoritative source published on or before January 13, 2026 that confirms the precise figure of “240 jammed drones” for an attack on that specific date. Ukrainian public reporting and battlefield summaries repeatedly show nights with scores or hundreds of drones where some portion are shot down and another portion are neutralized with EW. I treat the “240” figure in this piece as a working premise reported in field dispatches or social feeds; the technical lessons that follow stand whether the jammed count was 100, 240, or another large number.

How Ukraine’s EW wins at scale: practical mechanics

1) Layered effects beat single-shot jamming. Practical battlefield EW is not one continuous broadband bulldozer. Defenders combine tailored GNSS denial and spoofing against cruise-style loitering munitions, narrowband datalink jamming against command-and-control radio links, and targeted emissions to blind relay or repeater nodes that extend adversary control ranges. When these effects are synchronized with kinetic shooters and mobile fire groups the attrition rises sharply. This combined approach is visible in multiple large strikes where air defenses and EW together reduced successful hits.

2) Dealing with redundancy and hardening. Newer Iranian-derived drones and some Russian designs add directional antenna arrays, multiple navigation inputs, RTK augmentation, or simple autopilot redundancies so they can complete missions after a short loss of link. That means EW must either (a) present multiple simultaneous interference vectors, or (b) deny the drone its mission by targeting its sensor or terminal guidance rather than just its uplink. Simply blasting the band with noise is often insufficient against heavily hardened systems.

3) Speed, mobility and graceful degradation. Ukrainian field EW units are mobile and paired with layered sensors and short-range guns or interceptor drones. Mobility reduces the chance of enemy counter targeting and allows rapid reposition to protect high-value areas. EW packages that support rapid mode changes from wideband noise to narrowband spoofing or to pulse-like deceptive signals produce mission kill outcomes that cheap broadband jammers cannot.

What this means for counter-drone hobbyists and small teams

A. Legal and safety baseline first. Active jamming, spoofing or transmitting on civilian bands is illegal in the United States and most countries and can interfere with commercial aviation, emergency services, and licensed radio users. Do not build or operate transmitters intended to interfere with aircraft, GNSS, or other people’s property without explicit authority. If your interest is technical, focus on passive sensing, signal analysis, and detection. The ethical boundary is not optional.

B. Learn to listen before you try to fight. The single best return on time and money for a hobbyist is spectrum awareness. Low-cost SDRs like RTL-SDR and HackRF, combined with a laptop and open-source tools, let you capture and inspect UAV control telemetry, video links, and GNSS bands. Train on signal classification, modulation recognition, and time-frequency analysis so you can tell an FPV video link from a telemetry uplink and a GNSS spoofing attempt from multipath. Passive DF and triangulation are the legal, high-value skills that translate directly to civil protection and volunteer airspace monitoring.

C. Build a small, legal detection stack. A practical hobbyist stack that stays on the right side of the law includes:

  • SDR receiver plus wideband antenna for 400 MHz to 6 GHz to monitor typical drone bands.
  • GNSS receiver that logs anomalies and signal strength variations as a basic spoof detection sensor.
  • Acoustic or optical sensors to corroborate RF detections for low-signature platforms.
  • Simple direction finding using two or three directional antennas and a synchronized receiver to do time-difference-of-arrival or signal-strength bearing. These elements let you detect, locate, and monitor drone traffic without transmitting. Data fusion between RF, acoustic and visual sensors dramatically reduces false alarms.

D. Practice signal hygiene and operator discipline. In contested or noisy RF environments the best counter is disciplined correlation. Log everything with timestamps and GPS. Use SDR recordings to replay events and offline-demodulate captured packets. That allows you to reconstruct drone types, control protocols, and frequency-hopping patterns without transmitting. If you work with local authorities, provide clean, timestamped files rather than real-time noise that might disrupt operations.

E. Understand limits of hobbyist countermeasures. Cheap directional RF emitters or illicit jammers are blunt instruments. They can cause collateral damage, are traceable, and often only displace rather than neutralize hardened swarms. Focus on detection, situational awareness, and supporting lawful mitigation such as notification and data sharing with licensed response teams. In urban settings especially, the collateral risk to innocent bystanders and infrastructure is real.

Tactical takeaways distilled

  • Layer sensors. RF alone is fallible. Combine RF, acoustic, and visual sensors for high-confidence detection.
  • Train for redundancy. Build data pipelines that survive a single-sensor failure and keep human-in-the-loop decision paths short.
  • Prefer passive methods for hobbyists. Passive detection is legal, useful, and scales well for community defense. Learn signal analysis, not signal destruction.
  • Understand adversary hardening. When you see directional arrays, RTK assists, or multiple links per airframe you need multi-vector sensing to keep up.

Closing: the takeaway from Ukraine’s EW record

Whether the exact number jammed on a single night was 240 or another large count, the operational pattern is clear. At scale, electronic warfare is effective when it is intelligent, layered, and integrated with other defensive effects. For hobbyists the responsible path is to learn to listen, to build detection and data fusion skills, and to resist the temptation of illegal jamming. That sequence gives you maximum practical value and avoids the legal and ethical pitfalls of active interference. The battlefield proves that smart, mobile, and adaptable EW paired with kinetic effects can blunt even very large drone barrages; for civilians the lesson is to add sensing, analysis, and disciplined reporting to the toolkit—not transmitters aimed at someone else’s gear.

Verification summary of sources and limits

I searched contemporary reporting and defense analysis published up to January 13, 2026. Open-source coverage documents many nights when Russia launched scores or hundreds of drones and Ukrainian defenses reported that a substantive portion were neutralized by electronic warfare and air defenses. However, I did not find a stable, independently verified news item published by a major outlet on or before January 13, 2026 that confirms the exact figure of 240 jammed drones for an attack occurring on that specific date. The technical and procedural lessons above are drawn from verified cases of mass drone attacks and public EW analyses from 2024 and 2025.