I attended the European Defence Tech Hackathon in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2025. Held concurrently with the Baltic Miltech Summit, this hackathon was part of a series of hackathons being held in Europe as the continent prepares for the significant re-armament triggered by the shifting tides of global geopolitics.

Our team worked on a brief prepared by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, which was for the "development of an automatic and autonomous video detection and interception capability in the wide band 200 MHz-6100 MHz to work in a network of similar capabilities to triangulate drones (or at least direction finding) from detected and intercepted video and provide automatic target tracking."

We built a proof-of-concept system using commercially-available software-defined radio hardware and open-source software (GNU radio & python) to detect and intercept video signals from FPV drones. The main issue with previous-generation handheld detection systems being produced by enthuiasts and small companies in Ukraine is that the frequency bands used by the Russian invaders have been changing more often, making a more general interception capability necessary.

Our team was one of the top teams selected at the hackathon to pitch our project at the main conference. I was the presenter at both stages of the pitch competition.

I have two major reflections from this project: the first is that there seems to be a strong tendency towards over-engineering and gold-plating in defence procurement, driven in part because funding defence-tech projects is difficult without a dual-use application. The EU and NATO will not be able to mount a successful defence of democracy without a serious rethink of the procurement process. The second is an even stronger appreciation for the bravery and commitment of the Ukrainians working to defend their homeland. (A particular shout out to Alex, my Ukrainian teammate).