How many CRPA elements do you actually need?
Four, seven, eight or sixteen. The answer is set by the interference you expect, not by budget — an N-element array can null N−1 jammers, and no firmware will change that.
One rule decides most of it
An array of N elements can place at most N−1 independent nulls. That is not a firmware limit or a product tier — it is how many degrees of freedom the array has to spend. Four elements can null three jammers. Sixteen can null fifteen. Nothing in the signal processing changes that ceiling.
So the first question is not budget. It is: how many separate interference sources do you expect to be inside your antenna's field of view at the same time?
How many jammers is realistic?
For most commercial flying — survey work, inspection, delivery over ordinary terrain — one or two sources is the honest answer, and a four-element terminal covers it with margin. Cheap handheld jammers are single-source, and they are what most operators actually meet.
Where the count climbs is contested or congested airspace: border regions, large events, industrial sites with several emitters, or anywhere deliberate interference is organised rather than incidental. If you are flying there, a four-element array runs out of degrees of freedom quickly, and the failure is not graceful — once you exceed capacity, the extra sources raise the noise floor across the whole sky.
Weight and power are the other half
More elements means a bigger aperture, more RF chains and more processing. Across our range that runs from 130 g and 6 W at four elements, to 2600 g and 40 W at sixteen. On a small multirotor, 2600 g is not a trade-off — it is the entire payload.
This is why the widest part of the range sits at four elements: it is where most airborne platforms can actually carry the protection they need.
A rough mapping
| Platform | Typical choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Small multirotor, tight payload | 4 elements, 130 g | Protection you can actually lift |
| Mid-size UAV, mixed constellations | 4 elements, 400—520 g | Three systems plus spoofing options |
| Long-range or eVTOL | 7—8 elements | Six to seven jammers, still airborne weight |
| Ground vehicle or fixed site | 16 elements | Fifteen jammers, weight is not the constraint |
What to send us
Payload budget in grams, available power in watts, the constellations your receiver needs, and a sentence about where you fly. That is enough for us to name one model and explain why the others are wrong for you.