Ukrainian HIMERA radios tested by troops in Portugal

A Ukrainian handheld radio built for a war full of jamming has gone through two weeks of trials with troops in Portugal. Its maker, HIMERA, says two of its relay stations held a steady link about 11 km (7 miles) apart.

The Kyiv-based company posted the results on social media on Thursday. It said it took part in ARTEX 2026, the Portuguese Army’s annual technology exercise, which this year ran together with the European Defence Agency’s field-testing campaign, known as HEDI OPEX.

HIMERA said troops tested its tactical communications system “first through standalone trials and then as part of comprehensive tactical exercises involving a mechanized infantry unit.”

The kit included HIMERA G1 PRO handheld radios plus two kinds of repeaters, the B1 and R1. A repeater is a relay box that picks up a radio signal and passes it on, stretching how far troops can talk to each other.

“Stable communications were established between repeaters over a distance of approximately 11 km,” the company wrote.

HIMERA also said its radios were plugged into a system for passing coordinates to artillery, and that “stable communications were maintained between all users across the deployed radio networks.” It didn’t name the artillery system. The Defence Blog was unable to independently verify the test results, and the Portuguese Army has not published its own assessment.

The company said soldiers learned the system quickly and praised “its ease of use and communication range.” According to HIMERA, some of the military personnel who used the radios “expressed a desire to use the system in their units.”

ARTEX 2026 was held at the Santa Margarida Military Training Area in central Portugal from late September into October. More than 40 companies, startups and research groups brought equipment to be tested in field conditions.

HIMERA was founded after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It builds its radios to keep working under Russian jamming. The G1 PRO uses AES-256 encryption, frequency hopping and mesh networking, which lets each radio pass messages along for the others.

The radios have been drawing interest outside Ukraine. The company sold radios to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in the fall of 2024, its first sale outside Ukraine, and later filled an order for the defense ministry of a European NATO member that asked not to be named. This year, it also signed a cooperation agreement with Finland’s Bittium.

HIMERA reported in March 2025 that it had delivered 6,000 tactical radios to Ukraine’s military and was building 1,000 a month.