Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies British soldiers have successfully taken down drones with a radio-wave weapon. The demonstrator weapon, a type of Radiofrequency Directed Energy Weapon (RF DEW), uses high-frequency radio waves to disrupt the electronic components inside drones, resulting in the devices malfunctioning. "RF DEW systems can defeat airborne …
but lacks target discrimination.
MoD should hire some proper marketing specialist. This unfortunate quote could be easily rewritten as:
The inclusive nature of the technology means that a wide, embracing beam is used, capable of gently deactivating multiple drones from diverse origins simultaneously.
We were RFDF'ing U-Boats in the Atlantic in the 40's, you're saying we can't track and triangulate drone radio bands in 2025?
Don't go after the drones, find the people at the controls. Start hauling them in front of a magistrate and watch the numbers of incidents plummet.
Or is that a silly idea because some weapon manufacturer isn't making a multi-million Pound single use contract to shoot down a £200 whirlybird?
Screw it, sick day.
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"autonomous drones are a thing."
There's non-military software that lets one program a course track for a drone so it can fly a programmed route and do things. DJI makes versions used for GIS mapping that will fly patterns, collect photos and tag them with highly accurate GPS coordinates. The flight time for a Phantom or Mavic isn't that great for spy ops, but something more capable can be hacked together that uses the same software. With no emanations other than leakage from on-board electronics, drones are very hard to detect.
Not all drones require a soft pink squishy thing sitting in a portacabin somewhere to let them do their jobs - the technology to send an autonomous unmanned aircraft off to take pictures in places where you don't want to send expensive recon aircraft and hard-to-replace people was well known and in frequent use during the Vietnam War.
This is using radio waves to disrupt the electronics controlling the drone - so basically an electromagnetic pulse without the messy and very undesirable side effects of a nuclear bomb. Of course, if you happen to deploy one of these systems near an airport to protect your national infrastructure and accidentally shoot down an airliner or two because, once fired, the pulse cannot discriminate between a swarm of 2.5kg drones carrying high explosive and a flying people-carrier on finals, you might find some other unwanted side effects coming to public notice rather quickly...
So this gadget illuminates a wide area with a very high power RF beacon to fry drones.
But that same beacon inevitably tells the enemy, where the device is located. So a homing missile (that is designed to be immune) can easily knock it out. Just before the second wave of drones flies past unmolested.
presumably they mean like a mortar it's not based on Radio guidance but "What goes up must come down" and an angle of trajectory - It's well described here https://nigelef.tripod.com/basicgnryV2.htm
I think that the problem with all this stuff is that it's attritional warfare, and sooner or later we're going to run out of money.
It would seem far better to avoid trying to profit from defence industrial spending, and instead build to meet the needs of the country, to the best price point for the task.
Why don't we buy all the Russian Drone, they'd not have any left to use against us, and it'd be cheaper than the magic truck launch money bonfire.
Well, I don't believe that 10p a shot. That is probably the cost of the energy per shot. The military and its feeder companies don't do anything cheap. Cheap and disposable would be the way to go with these. On the back of an old Toyota pickup (they never die as Clarkson proved), make it out of commercial components, then all you have to worry about is squadies aiming it the wrong way ... oh dear!
Mortars and other artillery shells are much cheaper than £40,000,000, and most are completely immune to RF.
Gunner crews are well practiced at hitting an object the size of a flatbed truck with them, and of course an RF transmitter cannot be as well armoured as a main battle tank.
The part I'm more concerned about is the idea of putting them on civilian airports. Anything capable of frying the electronics of a commercial drone is also going to fry the electronics of a civilian aircraft.
Yup, it will be like turning on a search light at night. But at least it can be moved quickly. But, very useful in assymetric wars where the opponent doesn't have sophisticated systems. Of course we can't test it properly if that evil Trump goes and stops the war in Ukraine. We wanted to see how the Ruskies would handle it.
"10p per shot" implies it is not a continuous emitter, but is 'fired' on command.
Dis-continuous emitters are a lot harder to precisely locate and hit. Most anti-radiation missiles tend to be relatively small warheads, so need to get pretty close to the target to have an effect.
Also, it seems to be something that could be mobile to a degree (back-of-a-truck type mobility), so may be able to move after each time it fires, meaning your homing missile (if it can 'remember' a target location that stops transmitting) locked onto a geographic location that is now empty space.
Plus, where does the homing missile come from? If it is a big missile with long range, conventional air-defence can potentially knock down the missile; if shorter ranged and launched by an aircraft - conventional air defence shoots down the aircraft.
And yes - depending on how it is used, use of a homing missile might work - ultimately, all military equipment is an expendable munition of war, and sometimes the enemy succeeds.
But I can see this system being deployed at airfields / high profile conference events / nuclear power stations / the White House (well, not this system, but the US equivalent) to stop potential terrorist / insurgent strikes, and if/when it gets small enough, being fitted to Main Battle Tanks as part of an active defence capability.
Dis-continuous emitters are a lot harder to precisely locate and hit. Most anti-radiation missiles tend to be relatively small warheads, so need to get pretty close to the target to have an effect.
Maybe, but that's also a problem seen in Ukraine. So send a swarm of drones mixing decoys, ISR and live warheads to saturate the target, or force GBAD to go active and be targetted. Which is one of those cost things again. So Ukraine wants to spend $50bn to buy 15 Patriot systems. Kind of expensive, and kind of questionable that a bunch of trucks with launchers, radar and a command truck really does cost $2bn+ and a missile $5m+. So not exactly a cost effective solution for dealing with cheap drones.. which are an effective solution for generating fresh profits for Raytheon.
Something cheaper and capable of being mass produced would seem like a really good idea.
meaning your homing missile (if it can 'remember' a target location that stops transmitting) locked onto a geographic location that is now empty space.
Depends how it homes. But we're in the land of AI and the potential for drone swarms to share data. Remembering last location is easy, especially if datalinks allow triangulation. Then with a mix of sensors in the swarm, start a search pattern centred on last fix. Then maybe add in optical recognition for vehicles, tracks in fields, probabilities based on vehicle speed and roads and $2bn+ Patriot gets scrapped by maybe $250k's worth of cheap drones.
Plus, where does the homing missile come from?
Maybe a stealthy, loitering drone. Footage from Ukraine has shown things like drones parked on roads, waiting for targets and conserving battery. There's also been 'mothership' drones carrying 4x Lancets to extend range. Drones are getting bigger, eg Ukraine's 'Baba Yagar' which from memory is a Starlink equipped version that can carry anti-tank mines or supplies. And there's their naval drone that's been fitted with SAMs to ambush Russian aircraft. So it'll be possible to make anti-radiation missiles that can be carried by drones to sneak up on radar sites.
Yeah, the control antenna, which receives the radio transmission, where you pump in a few kilo-Watts of energy instead of the milli-Watts the circuits are designed for. Sure you can make them robust enough if you use vavles which can take a 10000 fold overload better... But not for long - ever seen them melting? For me only in videos and pics, never real...
Well, he is not wrong, but it is a negative balance. You don't gain energy out of it. You could reverse his argument by saying "they eat up beta radiation, those electrons". Don't tell Donald Trump about that negative balance. Or do, but wait until I sold my tube-maker stock.
Thy can still be mass-produced, but the shielding is going to add a lot of weight and reduce range/payload. Current drone development is an endlessly fascinating arms race. I think only a fool would bet on where we end up in 10 years time. Right now it's sort of delicate rock-paper-scissors between the dark arts of EW, the FPS-weaned shotgun toting kids, and the OR-guided school of swarms/decoys/stealth/fibre optic and shielded electronics gear.
Both, I assume. The USP is taking out multiple targets with a single 'shot'.
My understanding is that on the Ukraine battlefield small quad-copter type drones are used in swarms (eg. in a loitering munition role to pin down enemy troops), but also the small aircraft types are certainly used en-masse for long-range strikes in order to overwhelm kinetic/EW defences.
"I wonder if we are getting carried away with the idea of "consumer" drones here and whether the article was referring to the larger military style small aircraft sized drones?"
Those are still not that large and continuously scanning the sky with RADAR to find them paints a huge target on the RADAR's back. If the drone isn't sending out any signals, tracking them passively can be an issue. It also can mean they aren't flying around with open receivers for direct C&C. A patch can be programmed for a drone to take photos of and then fly to someplace unoccupied before opening a link with a Starlink sat and squirting back all of its data. An armed drone can be programmed to fly to it's target all inboard so a bit of Aluminum/Copper foil lining on the inside for shielding could do fine.
or you could attenuate the signal. have some specialized drones dispense a cloud of chaff in front of the swarm. The chaff could be aluminum coated mylar. That would scatter some of the signal.
This is just off the top of my head. I have no idea how much chaff would be required, but it would be a fairly cheap and light weight solution.
Except the antenna is connected to those electronics and is designed to pick up RF and you can't shield it.
Too much current on the antenna will fry the circuits just as well, probably better, than it being picked up via EMI on the PCB.
Stop trying to argue with electronics and RF engineers.
"Too much current on the antenna will fry the circuits just as well"
Inducing current into the receiver via the antenna is a very inefficient way of doing it. The front end input of any radio normally has a fairly high impedance (compared to a bare wire) and likely will have some input protection anyway.
The only effective countermeasure would be to have a drone that can navigate with 100% dead-reckoning (no GNSS) and no remote control or telemetry (and plenty of shielding around wires and electronics, optoisolated components, etc). Such drones would have very few legitimate civilian use cases.
@Jou(Mytzplyck > Unless you operate it with a long optic fibre you cannot shield it.
Half-right, for the wrong reason.
You could use Fibre Optic Gyroscopes, which are much more accurate than MEMS IMUs (and more immune to noise) and would allow for inertial navigation without GNSS, but these sort of things are bulky and expensive, more commonly found in cruise missiles than drones
Perhaps, but I expect this weapon is mainly aimed at cheap amateur-built drones which could be launched by terrorists. Even if they can navigate by dead reckoning (e.g. inertial, plus optical map correlation), the article says it is "effective against targets that are resistant to electronic warfare" suggesting that it is powerful enough to "fry" some components, but I suspect that applies only if those components are unshielded or very poorly shielded.
If they were trying to take down a military drone such as a Shahed, or a drone that was designed with resistance to RF directed energy weapons in mind, then they would use the laser, or failing that, a missile.
Give me an eye that offers two or three more colors direction UV and two or three more down the IR range. And lets not forget about the x-ray glasses here! Then they will get more love. Other than that only astronomers, lithographs, chemists, physicists and those with technical applications love them.
Yeah, the UV thing is okay so long as you're not a clubber.
I've got no lens in my eye so have no natural UV filtering, which means I can see more UV than most people... (black lights look very bright purple to me).
Unfortunately if you're in a nightclub where they're using UV to make things glow it really lights the place up... the beads of sweat running down the walls are a particular favourite thing I'd rather have not seen. ;)
In evolutionary terms, the love is proportionate. A slab of air will absorb a fair amount of UV and the further you go into the IR the larger your optics need to be (and there are other absorption bands there too) so Nature's choice of waveband has a lot going for it. Also, the Sun is quite bright at visible wavelengths but not so much at shorter ones. Various non-human eyes can see bits of spectrum that we can't, but they don't differ much. Stepping outside of biology and into engineering doesn't help much either since any passive sensor is bound by the same constraints.
Stepping outside of biology and into engineering doesn't help much either since any passive sensor is bound by the same constraints.
I think this is an area where techno-genies have escaped their bottle. So I enjoy photography, and used to have fun doing some UV. With good'ol 35mm, I could load UV senstiive film and shoot away. Then came digital, and.. I couldn't. CCD said 'no', unless I felt brave enough to try removing the filter from the CCD. Which would then rather upset most other DSLR modes other than manual. But technology moved on, both in hardware and software. Now we have a whole slew of cameras, or camera modules that can sense things that were once the purvue of expensive military stuff.
Which has lead to all sorts of interesting drone apps, like mostly automatic drone mapping & surveying.. But also more dangerous applications, like using the same technology to weaponise drones.
Typical 50 cm to 100 cm dish, general direction the the drone, the frequency it operates on, hit the button on the Cavity magnetron tuned to the frequency, circuits fried, done. Since the magnetron does not need to be as precise as needed for radar they can be produced very very very cheap.
So all in all sounds plausible to me, and could work near airports as well by using the typical RF frequency the drone(s) operate on with a more focused beam. Frying the RF circuit should be enough, the rest of the electronics don't matter if they survive. Yes yes, I write "more focused" for a reason, not "laser-perfect-focused" :D.
And a not insignificant piece of kit it is too ....... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/17/british-army-radio-waves-take-down-drone-swarm/
Yes it going to be interesting to see how far it can be miniaturised. An over-the-shoulder device could prove useful, although I suspect the real determining factor will be whether it can achieve machine gun like firing so can take down swarms, which comes back to the batteries...
Yes it going to be interesting to see how far it can be miniaturised. An over-the-shoulder device could prove useful, although I suspect the real determining factor will be whether it can achieve machine gun like firing so can take down swarms, which comes back to the batteries...
About a year ago, there were videos coming out of Ukraine showing soldiers using rifle-type anti-drone devices. Those could apparently disrupt or hijack DJI-type drones. But I haven't seen those used in more recent videos, which suggests they might have been rendered ineffective. There's also been images of vehicle mounted systems on SUV-sized trucks and jeeps. But there's also a been a switch to using fibre guided drones by both sides.
And like you say, batteries are likely the problem given physics and basics like the inverse square law that would restrict range & power levels for hand held devices. Vehicle mounted systems have less problems given they can mount generators, battery or capacitor banks and generate more power per shot. Plus well-known effects, like not standing in front of high powered radars and getting microwaved. But an interesting development to counter a growing threat. Not sure how useful they'd be on a battlefield given there'd need to be some form of search capability as well as drone zapping, which could make it vulnerable to detection and then being hard countered by anti-radiation missiles or maybe wire-guided drones.
"About a year ago, there were videos coming out of Ukraine showing soldiers using rifle-type anti-drone devices. Those could apparently disrupt or hijack DJI-type drones."
Sure, consumer drones that operate on the 2.4gHz band and require a link to a controller. The defense is to not have active RF receivers nor require a full time link to a controller or have the antenna physically switch off when outside of programmed coordinates.
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I would like to think they can ship this to Ukrain PDQ (like in the next few weeks) but having once worked on an MOD project that was an “urgent operational requirement” for the ill-conceived (stupid) invasion of Iraq, I can say that the war was (quite literally) over by the time the project got anywhere near complete.
The MOD’s idea of “urgent” is …errr …. flexible
1km range on the weapon.
Heavily dependent on how good your drone detection methods are
How well does it cope if drone navigating through built up area (buildings are good RF shields) rather than high in the air.
Would there be "collateral damage" to other electrical items in the built up area the drone passed through (presumably plan is to protect aforesaid built up area???)
RF waves can damage tissue too.....
Presumably current drones lack appreciable RF shielding to minimise weight (tare) and maximise payload.
That would likely change if these devices were to be deployed.
If the RF used is in the 1-1000GHz range the atmosphere absorbance would depend on the amount of water in the atmosphere along the path. So the attacking drone could be deployed on rainy days. I would guess based on the reflections from the targets and the environment the RF (pulses?) would be tailored (digitally synthesized) to avoid absorption by water vapour and oxygen molecules.
I cannot help thinking the completely mechanical V1 buzz bombs would be completely immune to these shenanigans.
Personally I would try autonomous hunter UAVs, with conventional airframes, that could rapidly identify and disable in flight drone weapons using fairly primitive technology (bullets?) The airframe technology could be pretty 20th century - a glider aerodynamics with aviation gasoline engine powered propellors so with decent onboard computing could remain in the air for extended periods both patrolling the sky and providing general surveillance. With peer to peer comms these UAVs could rapid assemble to deal with a large concerted drone attack. Could even be made from plywood and powered with Honda four stroke chainsaw engines. ;)
If the RF used is in the 1-1000GHz range the atmosphere absorbance would depend on the amount of water in the atmosphere along the path.
Hmm.. sooo.. Cheap shielding by wrapping your electronics in wet newspaper? Or soak corrugated cardboard and maybe the corrugations could act as waveguides for extra shielding. But Patrick Lancaster recently posted a video showing some detail of Russia's ISR and Lancet drones, the latter being mostly plastic & carbon. Lancets have been evolving pretty rapidly, so whether their composition could be modified to add shielding.
But that conflict has very much demonstrated the effectiveness of cheap drones, thus demonstrating the need for something to counter them. Kinda curious why the emphasis on 10p a shot, but that's probably to highlight the cost of current anti-drone tech, like 25mm or 30mm air defence rounds, or $$$ for missiles. Plus the down-range risks. So this system might fry a drone, but maybe also your TV or PC, smart phone etc if they're in the beam path. But that's probably better than being down-range of air defence artillery or missiles.
Even bullets are more than £1 a pop these days, and you would send hundreds at each drone.
Yep. This venerable beast has proven pretty effective-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard#Operational_history
Each gun has a firing rate of 550 rounds/min. The combined rate of fire is 1,100 rounds/min, which – in unlimited mode – gives a continuous fire time of 35 seconds before running out of ammunition (with 640 AA rounds
Germany delivered the last 3 pledged Gepards to Ukraine by 22 December 2023 along with an additional 30,000 rounds of ammunition.
But the 35mm ammunition costing a lot more than £1. Plus there were some politics around Switzerland making the ammo, and Swiss neutrality hampering supplies to Ukraine. Some of that has been semi-resolved with Germany producing the ammunition. But 30,000 rounds doesn't really go that far given the amount of stuff flying around Ukraine. But 35mm ammo is big enough to do smart fuzing and have rounds airburst around the target. But also a few snags, eg Qatar-
These were purchased in order to ensure air security for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Which might be great for people at the World Cup, or similar high-risk public events, but not so great for anyone around it and downrange. With this new system, risk is probably just some fried electronics. Which could also be a bonus, ie people that don't turn off their mobile phones could be forced to.
Bullocks! A quarter-inch thick (6 mm) thick box made out of Tungsten and use fibre-optics for internal communications to the Tungsten-shielded brushless motors and this drone defence system is DEFEATED! If the 6mm thick tungsten box is too heavy for containing the CPU controllers for your smaller drone, try thin sheets (1 mm) of Zinc-galvanized steel interspersed with glued-on 2 mm thick nylon sheets to form a Faraday Cage that works at multiple EM bands!
To cool your CPU electronics and drone controllers, immerse them fully in liquid silicone oil and use fins and heat-sinks to transfer the heat to the outside. For the antennas, use a multi-EM-band Fractal Antenna 3D printed directly on the outside of the drone hull and use a varistor in-between your sensitive electronics as a protection against RF induction overload! The Fractal antenna can be shaped for and 3D printed directly on the outer hull that will allow for 250 MHz up to 120 GHz radio operations using unjammable frequency-hopping and spread-spectrum modalities.
There! I fixed it! How hard can it be to RFI/EMI and Radiation-Harden your electronics?
V
Not hard, but expensive and heavy.
The target drones are the swarms of small and cheap drones that overwhelm air defenses and are used to bomb cities.
Heavy and expensive stuff van be taken down with conventional air defenses.
for a 10 cm by 10 cm by 5 cm thick box made out of an outer layer of 0.5 mm thick galvanized steel sheet (i.e. 25 gauge sheet metal), a second layer of solid 0.5 mm thick nylon sheet and an inner layer of 0.5 mm thick galvanized steel sheet, the Faraday Shield box for your controller hardware and software weighs in at only 337 grams (0.337 kilograms or 0.743 pounds or 11.89 ounces!). That is more than enough shielding for the smaller drones against 250 Mhz and 120 GHz drone defences.
if you STILL want higher-end RFI/EMI/RAD-hardening, then use 1 mm thick (15 gauge) Zinc galvanized sheet steel with a 1 mm thick layer solid nylon sheet and another layer of 1 mm thick Zinc galvanized sheet steel at 10 cm by 10 cm by 5 cm thick which is more than enough room to hold your drone controller electronics! That heavier-duty Faraday shield box STILL only weighs 682 grams ( or 1.5 lbs or 24 ounces or 0.68 KG!) so it is STILL plenty lightweight for smaller suicide drone use that will overwhelm aerial defences!
AND to protect against Lasers and Masers, a higher-quality Zirconium-and-Tungsten-Ceramic-based Intumescent paint of 2 mm thick can protect against as much as 4000 Degrees Celcius for over 60 minutes making even THOSE beam-based drone defences a fully moot point! (i.e. look up Starlite and how to make Starlite on Youtube in order see how you can make high-heat protecting Intumescent paint at home!)
Now you know! The Math Works!
V
Cool, now you have an expensive drone with reduced range and payload.
I don't think you and all the posters saying "just shield it!" understand the flight requirements of small drones. Every single OUNCE counts. Every single price increase adds up to less weapons.
Exactly, most "toy" drones people play with at weekends are under 250g due to the CAA regs, that includes the battery. every single component is optimised for weight and performance, even light shielding would reduce ffligth time/distance making them useless unless they're made big enough which then makes them easy targets to just be shot down by some grunt with a rifle.
The drones we are talking about here are suicide drones made by 3rd parties who don't give a rat's arse about FAA or CAA regulations. They will create 2.2 lbs (1000 grams) shielded drones with 250 grams of Semtex in a tube of ultra light weight but super hard and body-slicing SHARP silicon carbine fragmentation lining that will obliterate a 30 metre radius around the drone once it detonates. They will use a cheap butane fuel cell source that lasts for 30 minutes to an hour and then the drone finds the target using onboard 2D-XY or 3D-XYZ SOBEL/CANNY edge detection and pixel-vectorization for real-time object recognition and then fly itself over to the target and THEN GO BOOM! No GPS needed! 3D terrain and 3D object recognition is ALL that is needed!
"which then makes them easy targets to just be shot down by some grunt with a rifle."
Good luck with that. Those little toy drones are hard to see, much less get a round on target without filling the sky with Pb.
The little toys aren't that useful on a battlefield. They don't have the flight time nor flight dynamics (they suck in a breeze). I have a much larger Phantom 4 and the battery life goes to hell in the wind. My limiting factor is usually the camera mount. The servos can't take too much of a cross wind. Besides the camera mount, it can fly in much stronger wind than the >250g stuff. A DJI Inspire and larger drones do even better. Drones with lifting surfaces can traverse much long distances and carry heavier loads. On the battlefield, those big drones are nice to get back, but that's not counted to happen very often.
A Fractal antenna can be directly 3D printed right onto an aerodynamic monocoque hull of a 2.2 lbs (1000 grams) drone that is then covered with intumescent paint which has up to 4000 Celcius of heat protection if you use Zircon and Carbides/Borides! The 250 MHz to 120 GHz radio waves STILL go through the ceramic and you can etch microchannels filled with dialectric silicone oil under the 2mm thick copper fractal antenna layer which will absorb heat from Laser or Maser-based drone defence systems.
Again, you put BIG varistors in-between the antenna and electronics and use DSP (Digital Signal Processors) to process and extract the antenna-inducted waveforms filled with spread-spectrum/frequency-hopping RF and MM-wave transmissions OR you fly using purely autonomous flight control using 2D-XY/3D-XYZ SOBEL/CANNY edge-detection with pixel-to-vector conversion with real-time object recognition of 3D terrain, land-features, buildings, ground objects, people, military hardware, etc. NO GPS or inertial guidance system needed at all!
For the fuel source, you put Butane or Propane in a small 10 cm long by 5 cm diameter fuel bottle that supplies a thermo-electric fuel cell the size of two decks of playing cards which supplies enough watts to power a drone for 30 minutes to one hour or even more! Then you hit your target with 250 grams to 500 grams of Semtex fitted inside of an ultra-sharp body-slicing fragmentation bottle made of light-weight Silicon Carbide or you can add a section filled with Napalm or Thermite incendiary or even a high-performance fuel-air mixture to use as a mini-thermobaric device that can wipe out a 25 to 50 metre radius in a MASSIVE shockwave-inducing item-and-person smashing fireball!
With modern Gigastamping technology, I could get a simple medium sized warehouse that could stamp-out an array of 100 by 100 of per minute of aerodynamically-optimized monocoque drone hulls that are fully rad-hardened and EMI/RFI/Laser/Maser Faraday Cage-shielded to make a MILLION PER DAY to overwhelm ANY drone defence! And with the fully-autonomous flight-control and SOBEL/CANNY/Vector object recognition software, I could DIRECTLY target and obliterate the defensive systems themselves and the persons running them! The ARM-based SOC (System-on-a-chip) only needs four channels of HD 1920 by 1080 video at 60 fps (front, back, left, right) and enough RAM memory to do the vision recognition work and SDR (Software Defined Radio) work needed and those chips are $35 USD each on a bulk order so each drone is CHEAP to make and quick to deploy! You set it and forget it!
Now THAT is proper Drone Warfare in a fully 3D-Battlespace of overwhelming-numbers of fully-autonomous aerial drone offensive action!
V
OK, now you added liquid/gas fuel source. <processing> <reading your other posts> <processing>
Actually, now I want to see it flying! For orientation a reconnaissance throwaway drone or model plane ahead to have the current data. Or whatever other things possible, lidar (IR and UV) from high above...
Liquid fuel is the BEST and has the highest stored energy value for drone operations! We do it all the time at our facilities! We make lightweight ceramic bottles filled with Butane or Propane or even methanol with an embedded high-pressure ball-valve/mini-regulator that provides a pressurized fuel to a Thermo-Cell which creates heat and electrical power from a simple and well-timed chemical reaction that works up to TWO HOURS for a 10 lbs drone. Those ceramic pressurized fuel bottles are stamped-out by the THOUSANDS. The RFI/EMI/EMP/RAD-hardened motors are ceramic-coated for high heat resistance and the electrical rotor drive motors themselves are shielded Cobalt-Samarium magnets + ceramic coated windings and ferrite core for thermal and induction overload protection.
And we can stamp them out CHEAPLY using 20 tonne presses that punch out a multi-layer sheet-metal and plastic monocoque body for optimal aerodynamics in less than 30 seconds!
IT'S NOT THAT HARD to do!
Nope! We work at NCA (North Canadian Aerospace aka our mainstream media pseudonym) which is an underground/under-the-radar, fully-ITAR-free all-Canadian manufacturer of aerospace products based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada! We do applied-research and fully-in-house-custom-make DCI-128K at 64-bit-RGBA cameras, 1024-core 2THz 50 PetaFLOPS at 128-bits wide combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector super-computer processors, Electrostatic-propulsion/GWASER-based spaceplanes, 64-bit RGB+Distance RADAR/Optical/IR/UV/XRay/Gamma imaging satellite systems, 6-axis, ultra-fast 1000-head polymer/ceramic-powder/metal-powder 3D printers, and a number of other high-tech products! We also put twin turbo-jet engines of 70,000 lbs of thrust each into all-Carbon-fibre custom-built 100 foot long Deep-V ocean race boats and Custom-CNC-machined 3000 HP Sapphire-Ceramic-coated all-Titanium V12 race engines into Ford F450 Superduty trucks! We even make full-size autonomous and ROV-operated robot dinosaurs such as T-Rex that have 12 inch long (30 cm) ultra-sharp Vanadium/Nickel/Cobalt-cryo-hardened Stainless Steel teeth!
There! That should about do it for telling you who I work for!
V
"ry thin sheets (1 mm) of Zinc-galvanized steel interspersed with glued-on 2 mm thick nylon sheets to form a Faraday Cage that works at multiple EM bands!"
I'd use Copper mesh. The mesh dimensions can be chosen based on the frequency bands and a couple of different sizes can be used. The mesh is also much lighter.
You can use fully sealed shells of muMetal, or 24 gauge (0.5 mm) sheet metal boxes of Zinc-Galvanized Steel layers interspersed with 2 mm thick nylon or HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) film-sheets and another layer of Zinc-galvanized sheet steel. You can also use half-inch thick (12 mm) solid Tungsten as the ULTIMATE in Faraday caging and use fibre-optics for all outside-of-box communications using an S-shaped optically-clear lead-crystal-lens fibre optic communications port that prevents RFI/EMI/EMP/RAD from entering the box!
In our own drone systems, we use the Tungsten boxes with dialectric Silicone Oil immersion-based CPU/DSP/GPU-motherboard and RAM cooling and we then cover the box with 5 mm thick layers of Zircon and Boride/Carbide intumescent paint and ceramic layers that can withstand 4000 degrees Celcius temperatures coming from RF/MM-wave systems or Lasers/Masers!
For the motors, we use EMI/RFI/EMP/RAD-hardened high-heat-resistant Cobalt-Samarium magnets (400 Celcius rated!) and ceramic-coated copper coils and ceramic-coated ferrite cores for the 4 to 16 ducted-fan drive motors that are EACH self-powered with a propane or butane thermocell that lasts almost 2 hours! The rotors and ducted fan housings are also ceramic coated to prevent Laser/Maser-based drone defence systems. We even have on-board impact/spall-protection fragmentation defence systems and multi-layer/multi-hit .50 CAL capable ceramic-plate armouring to ensure flight-worthiness after an encounter with ballistic defences!
Flight control imaging systems are RF/MM-wave/RGBA/IR and UV-based multi-spectral imaging with a backup Inertial Guidance System accurate to about 10 metres with no augmentation and down to 50 cm with RF/MM-wave augmentation. We also use thick 2mm shielded and Varistor-isolated silicone oil-cooled Fractal Antennas that use Spread-Spectrum and Frequency-Hopping technology to prevent action by drone defence systems!
AND this all weighs less than 10 to 250 lbs depending on the drone size and any ordnance it carries!
V
Funny how this & a couple of other versions of this story are missing the critical detail of who actually developed & built this thing. It's not secret and is mentioned on the fuller stories.
The MOD might have requested it & paid for it and had one of their people driving it for this test but despite the spin MOD isn't responsible for the work that actually created it.
The people who put the hours into designing and making it are getting sold short to make MOD look more competent.
In 1999 the USA's CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) created In-Q-Tel which was a private but CIA-run for-profit company that STILL funds worldwide private sector research and development into ground breaking fields including drone defence and offence AND in fuel-cell-based drone propulsion system and autonomous flight control! BAE (British Aerospace) ALSO has a separate private investment company that does the same thing AND MI5 and MI6 have cooperated on creating a company that does the same thing! I do remember a news announcement in 1995 about that but I just can't remember off the top of my head what its name was! The UK started the trend of intelligence agencies running private companies to invest in private research and develop but the US-based In-Q-Tel today rules the roost with OVER THREE BILLION U.S. DOLLARS worth of investment in various companies world-wide!
And NO !!! None of them invest in us! NCA (North Canadian Aerospace) is Fully Self-Funded! Why do you think I know so much about drones and 3D-battlespace C4SIR and autonomous flight control? I actually DEVELOPED the ENTIRE vision recognition and CODEC software suite to do so! Not to brag too much but my real-time Audio/Video/Metadata CODECs and SOBEL/CANNY and RGBA/HSLA/Greyscale DSP image processing code that I developed works wonders at multi-channel/multi-spectral DCI-4K/8K/16K/32K/64K and even DCI-128K resolutions at up to 10,000 fps at 64-bit RGBA/IR/UV/MM-wave/RF/XRAY/Gamma Bands! I think I know of what I speak!
V
Nothing new here as far as I can see from the functional description. I wrote an article years ago about how easy it would be to knock 2.4GHz controlled drones out of the sky by disabling the door interlock on a 1kW microwave oven, (also c. 2.4Ghz, but a very unstable, wideband signal), opening the door and pointing the cavity roughly in the direction of the pesky thing to swamp its control channel....I should add that I never actually tried it, of course... Sounds like someone's put a Curry's microwave in a van and possibly connected it to an antenna. I demand my royalties...
(Of course the really useful trick would be to get it to return to sender...).
Using SDR (Software Defined Radio) source code and multiple COTS (Common Off the Shelf) CPU or SoC chips that are PRECISELY interleaved with a common timing circuit and delay lines can sample/resample parts of ANY waveform using just their GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins and use software to combined the interleaved parts to digitize ANY waveform (i.e. ADC - Analogue to Digital Converter) from 100 MHz up to 120 GHz at up to 32 bit resolutions per sample and sample rates at up to 10 Gigasamples per second and then also use the same GPIO pins to reconstruct an analogue waveform (i.e DAC aka Digital to Analogue Converter) from 100 MHz to 120 GHz which can be used for burst-rate frequency-hopping and spread-spectrum communications that are pretty much UNJAMMABLE!
I can also tell you that ANY general purpose CISC, SoC or RISC chip with a clock speed from 500 MHz to 5 GHz can be combined and interleaved to sample waverforms normally needing VERY EXPENSIVE ultra-highspeed GaN (Gallium Nitride) or GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) circuitry!
There! I fixed your jamming problems in an INEXPENSIVE and EASY off-the-shelf manner!
V
"Is this simply jamming or actually destroing circuit board components somehow ?"
The difference would be on how much power you could bring to bear on the drone. A consumer model is supposed to return to it's take off point if it loses lock so that's going to point at the operator even if they flew a dog-leg pattern coming in. If the RF front end is destroyed, hard to say what it might do. If there's any sort of protection from that sort of overload, the drone would RTB and not be able to 'hear' any different commands.
I assume magnetrons. 1MW peak power Assume 20dB antenna gain and 90dBm transmit power. At 1km you will see about 0dBm, or 1mW. Hardly going to overheat anything. If you push the power and push the antenna gain, then perhaps 1W received power at 1km. Should not need massive shielding and hardening to cope with that.
The power could easily be enough to make microcontrollers go wrong. A watchdog fixes that. You need a lot more power to actually damage the electronics. Even partial shielding will fix that. It will work a lot better at shorter ranges like 50m, if you can actually target the antenna at a moving drone that close.
There has been work on relativistic magnetrons with GW peak output powers:
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/mre/article/4/6/067201/253062/Review-of-the-relativistic-magnetron
"In 1985, Benford et al. developed a 6.9 GW, 4.5 GHz relativistic magnetron. In the late 1980s, and early 1990s, they studied phase locking and high-repetition-rate operation. They also developed the ORION HPM test source for the UK in the early 1990s. These advances at Physics International are reviewed below."
6.9GW would be a lot more challenging. If that is what they have. Nevertheless it should still be possible to shield and harden with low added weight. And a good deal more engineering. The problem is any gap in the shielding, for example for the camera and fibre. My guess is that it would disable all current cheap drones. But would soon be obsolete as drones were hardened against the attack.
6.9 GW converted to Brake Horsepower is about 9,253,052 BHP which means about 12 of the GE (General Electric) Harriet-class natural-gas-powered turbines (600 Megawatts) should about do it and at about $10 million USD for a full install price per turbine it's only about $120 million USD for the whole package to power that fancy 6.9 Gigawatt MASER/LASER/PARTICLE BEAM setup on a continuous basis to down planes, trains, automobile and even turn people into piles of carbon ash in 5 seconds or less! That's not too bad of a price to pay for full-service beam-based destruction at the touch of a button!
V
1km range, takes out groups indiscriminately, I see no problem here. Why would a swarm of drones be approaching a military facility? It won't be for surveillance as it makes far more sense to send in 1-2 small drones for that. A swarm will be far more detectable than a couple appraoching from different directions. A swarm would also be carrying munitions to attack the target. Who cares if a few friendly drones are hit if the facility is protected?
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