Sentrycs Scout: Man-Portable Cyber-Over-RF Counter-Drone Kit

Sentrycs, the Israeli counter-UAS company acquired by ONDAS last year, debuted a new man-portable cyber-over-RF detector called Scout at SOF Week in Tampa earlier this month. The product compresses the company’s fixed-site detection and mitigation stack into a battery-powered handheld unit aimed at tactical operators.

Sentrycs is also fresh off World Cup security contracts and a NATO exercise in Romania, which makes the SOF launch a deliberate move into the special operations market.

What Cyber-Over-RF Actually Does

Most counter-drone systems sit in one of four buckets: kinetic (shoot it down), jam (overwhelm its RF link), spoof (feed it false GPS), or detect-only (tell you something’s flying and let you handle it some other way). Cyber-over-RF, or CoRF, is a fifth approach. It reads the actual command-and-control protocols that commercial drones use to talk to their controllers, instead of just sensing that RF energy is in the air.

The practical effect is specificity. Once the system identifies the protocol, it can pull out the drone’s serial number, the operator’s location, and the flight characteristics.

Sentrycs has been building this capability since 2017, and the Scout press materials emphasize that operators can not only locate an unauthorized drone but also take controlled command and land it in a designated area without firing a shot or interfering with nearby authorized radios.

That last part is the differentiator. A broadband jammer in a stadium environment knocks out not just the rogue drone but also press radios, security comms, and any commercial wireless within range. A kinetic interceptor in an urban area creates a falling-debris problem; CoRF avoids both failure modes by speaking the drone’s own language and taking it down quietly.

What Scout Adds

The Sentrycs core technology has been deployed as fixed-site or vehicle-mounted installations protecting airports, military bases, prisons, and other sensitive infrastructure.

Scout takes that capability and shrinks it into a battery-powered, man-portable form factor built for field use. Sentrycs is positioning it as a kit a small team can carry into operations where a fixed installation isn’t possible, as Unmanned Air Space reported.

The press materials emphasize ruggedization for challenging operational conditions and rapid deployment by tactical forces. Real-time situational awareness is delivered to the operator on the move rather than to a control room. Specifications around range, frequency coverage, weight, and battery life are not in the public announcement.

Sentrycs showed Scout at SOF Week, the special operations industry conference held in Tampa earlier this month. The product appeared at the Sentrycs booth in the Convention Center, at Mistral Group’s adjacent booth, and at the Peter O. Knight Airport tactical outpost where the show runs live equipment demos.

Mistral Group is Sentrycs’ US distribution partner, which matters because the SOF customer base buys through US-flag prime contractors and integrators rather than direct from Israeli manufacturers.

Where Sentrycs Sits in 2026

The company was founded in 2017 in Israel and spent its first years selling CoRF systems to defense and security customers across Europe and the Middle East. ONDAS, a US-listed industrial wireless and counter-drone holding company, agreed to acquire Sentrycs in 2025 and completed the deal late last year.

That moved Sentrycs into a NASDAQ-listed public-company structure under the ONDS ticker, which is meaningful for procurement and disclosure patterns.

The deal flow since the acquisition has been steady. In April 2026 Sentrycs was selected to provide counter-drone security for the FIFA World Cup, joining a roster of vendors covering the tournament across 11 US host cities, and earlier the same month its technology was demonstrated in the LCI-X Crucible Eastern Phoenix 2026 NATO exercise at the Capu Midia training range in Romania alongside local partner STARC4SYS.

The company also holds active deployments with German State Police and multiple military bases across Europe, plus reorders from Middle Eastern customers as regional drone threats have escalated.

Twenty-five-plus countries is the reach claim. The actual concentration sits in Europe, the Middle East, and now the US through Mistral. Scout is the company’s first explicit man-portable product, and the SOF Week debut is a deliberate signal that Sentrycs wants the special operations customer in addition to its existing fixed-site footprint.

DroneXL’s Take

Let’s be straight, CoRF works, and it’s also not a universal counter-drone solution.

What it does well is identify and take controlled command of commercial drones whose command protocols are known and reverse-engineered. That covers DJI, Autel, Parrot, Skydio, and most of the consumer and prosumer market.

For protecting a stadium during the World Cup, a prison from contraband drops, or an embassy from a hobbyist who flew where he shouldn’t have, CoRF is close to ideal.

No collateral RF damage, no falling debris, a clear chain of custody on the drone and its operator.

What CoRF does not do is touch FPV drones flying on bespoke serial radio links, the kind dominant in Ukraine right now. It also doesn’t touch autonomous threats like Shahed-136 class systems that fly without a continuous control link, or military-grade hardware that doesn’t speak commercial protocols. SOF operators in austere theaters will face plenty of both.

So Scout is a tool for a specific threat envelope, not the threat envelope. The man-portable form factor is a real product move. It opens the kit to small teams that couldn’t carry a fixed installation, and it pairs naturally with the things SOF operators already deploy alongside their drone defense, including jammers, gun-and-net systems, and where the rules of engagement allow, kinetic interceptors.

Layered C-UAS is the only honest answer to a layered drone threat.

The interesting test will be the World Cup. Sentrycs has contracts, the federal counter-drone coverage is thin, and 11 host cities will be running multiple vendors against an unknown number of hobbyist and bad-actor drone incursions over 39 days of competition. The CoRF approach should look very good against the curious tourist with a Mini 4 Pro flying over a stadium.

It will be a different conversation if anyone shows up with something that doesn’t talk OcuSync.

Photo credit: Sentrycs