FAA to test Brit drone-busting kit The US's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will trial the "world's first fully integrated detect-track-disrupt-defeat Anti-UAV Defence System (AUDS)", developed by a trio of British companies. Blighter Surveillance Systems, Chess Dynamics and Enterprise Control Systems describe AUDS as intended "for countering drones or …
Well, quite. And also, if my drone could use wifi, 4g, 3g, etc. could it really block all those? Or some sort of custom telemetry on some random frequency? If I'm planning something nefarious with a drone then I'm probably not going to be too scared of OFCOM turning up to complain weakly at the unlicensed spectrum use ...
I came here to say LOS... it doesn't even have to be LOS to the operator, either, if a second, relay, drone is used.
Maybe someone down-voted you because they misread your comment as condoning drone use near airports?
Autonomous drones are also an option, especially given the investment in machine vision and the like that everybody from MS, Intel, Google to Qualcomm are making.
From what we've seen in terrorist attacks in recent years, they are almost exclusively low-tech. Smart phones seem to be about the most complex kit they use and that's just for sending SMS.
It's like the cold war all over again where the US "won" by outspending the USSR, or at least "leaking" fake info on capabilities to cause spending in fruitless areas.
But now it's not even the terrorists pretending to have these capabilities. It's the tech and arms companies making us think the terrorsts "might" do something so "we" have to spend a lot of money on their countermeasures.
I don't know how this system purports to work, but a UAV's flight path can be at least disrupted by spoofing GPS. The signals are very weak. It is fairly easy to impersonate the satellites and transmit signals with manipulated timing to trick the receiver into thinking it is somewhere else. You may not be able to direct it exactly where you want it, but could easily force it away from you and out of control range of its owner. Then just let it run out of power somewhere else.
The only problem with jamming GPS on the drone is you are jamming GPS for everyone else in the area at the same time. In the vicinity of airports this is a Bad Thing © ® ™ Modern aircraft are extremely dependent on GPS for important things like altitude, in my opinion too dependent, but that is a subject for another comment.
And version 2.0...
...will include two small missiles launched after target acquisition. The first will home on the drone, and the second on the drone controller. Problem solved!
I had a better idea. Have an autonomous drone loaded with explosive that homes in on the AUDS system and destroys it.
Back in the day with Rapier, the command TX could knock out a R/C aircraft at several km away. All down to the 40Kwatts of power coming out of the command transmitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapier_%28missile%29
Suspect this is doing just the same. 5-8 seconds must be the time fry the electronics.
That article says NOTHING about shooting a 40kW beam anywhere to anything. That is a cute fantasy playing out in your own mind. That system only shoots physical missiles and uses varying methods (Radio/LASER/LIDAR/RADAR/etc) for control and targeting, not energy beams as weaponry. You should read what you link to before you error as you did.
> That system only shoots physical missiles and uses varying methods (Radio/LASER/LIDAR/RADAR/etc) for control and targeting,
You missed the point, Dadmin. What AC said is that whilst Rapier uses physical missile to shoot down enemy aircraft, Rapier's radar targeting system was powerful enough to upset the electronics in amateur radio-controlled aircraft - after all, it was designed to be powerful enough to defeat any jamming attempts. Given the targeting radar used a narrow beam, and required a separate generator (let's use that as a rough proxy for its power output) it is plausible.
Frequency coverage: GPS L1 (1575.2MHz), 915MHz ISM, 2.4GHz ISM.
RF output: GPS L1: 1W nom, 10W into antenna, 915 MHz ISM: 40W into antenna, 2.4GHz ISM, 40 to 50W into antenna.
Antenna: Three integrated 15dBc circularly polarised high gain.
(now tucking the brochure away in my desk drawer)
During a little unpleasantness in the South Atlantic, I and a group of fellow techies, put together a radar jamming system. When tested locally (in the UK) it quite happily brought down RC aircraft.
Really pissed of the local RC flying club too, but they had been warned not to fly, so tough luck. Amused us though.
We always wait for the accident.
Every safety idea you have, every bit of "common sense" on safety, every rule written has been done so in blood. A new or unique threat will always be ignored by industry and governments until after the accident.
Seen this first hand, wrote a report explaining the new threat, presented it to the safety committee of which I was a member, and recommended basic, simple, cheap responses and barriers to inform people of the risk and keep them at a safe distance. Committee rejected the idea that there could ever be a problem, that groups of engineers much wiser than safety committee members had already assured them there was no safety concerns. After that they no longer supported my membership on their committee.
Long after I left I was told there was an incident. The committee used my report, which one of them still had, to respond to the incident. They even used my write up to explain the hazard and they put in place all the steps I had suggested to keep people safe. Nice to be proven right but the real lesson is we always have to wait for the accident, and pointing it out ahead of time is a bad thing unless there is profit or political power to be gained.
Without blood no new safety rules can be written and even then most require massive amounts of red blood, though less is required if the blood spilled is blue.
Oh, I know, although the regulator to which I work says we should be going beyond compliance and predicting the next accident to prevent it before it happens. While also having a course where predicting the future is compared to driving a car down a country road at night, without headlights, looking out the rear window.
I just think it's ironic that when regulators try and prevent accidents before they happen someone from the cheap seats complains they're being needlessly restrictive as no one's died. Yet.
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