The arms race for anti-drone weaponry
theverge.com
theverge.com
Knowing that the federals are themselves creating partially self-piloted full-sized aircraft armed with lethal area-effect weaponry (Predator/Reaper/Avenger/Grey Eagle) or surveillance arrays capable of observing entire cities at once (Gorgon Stare/Constant Hawk/Angel Fire) makes me angry at the hypocrisy and nervous about the potential consequences.
If nothing else, it undermines my enjoyment of modern and sci-fi subgenres of the Western, and any War-genre movie with an underdog guerilla group. For instance, when Hunger Games 3a showed me a fighter-bomber going down to a bow and arrow, it was Sid Meier's Civilization modern jet fighter vs. archers-stack all over again. It just can't happen, people; you can't fight war machine X on the traditional battlefield without anti-X weaponry. And you can't fight a nation that deploys hunter-killer drones with just AR-15s and AK-47s. Your tactics have to change dramatically.
I think all this drone/anti-drone arms-racing is just going to push Americans into inventing 5th-generation warfare sooner, and it's going to be really, really ugly. Prison drug deliveries are just the tip of the iceberg.
Seems like that might be a little cheaper than developing ECM to target drones. Although if it is really just a pork-barrel, then a $200 shotgun with $25 worth of shells is much less efficient than a multi-thousand dollar radar jammer rifle.
Effective range for taking out a drone is "as far as the bird shot will shoot" which is much further than ~120ft. We aren't talking about effective range (e.g "breaking a clay plate").
That being said - your point about increasing altitude still stands. I'm not sure how birdshot will go when shot near vertically - but it can travel well over 200 yards horizontally depending on if you're using 04 or 08, etc. At a certain point its harmless to humans unless it hits in the eye but as long as it hits a blade of a drone it could still damage the drone and bring it down. It doesn't need to completely destroy the drone like a point blank blast of a double barrel with buckshot would.
In a situation like a max-security prison, where you've already got cleared dead spaces around it to shoot escaping prisoners, its not really an issue.
It made some vague allusions to that product's market and then suggested that federal regulations would prevent the sale of it to local law enforcement, but I didn't see any real argument for why local law enforcement should be able to buy jammers other than some isolated incidents in prisons. There also wasn't any explanation for why the FCC and FAA have the rules about jamming. I suspect devices like the Drone Defender are banned for good reason.
IR beacons have the downside of blatantly broadcasting their positions, but they might be less jammable than radio waves? OTOH, pointing an IR laser at your camera isn't that hard, so maybe not.
You could also take a page from the SR-71 and correct your inertial guidance system's error using star observations. Only needs to see up, so you can shield it against blinding attempts from below. Can a drone-weight camera pick up stars?
Horizon tracking would be super cool. You'd have to open your cameras to blinding attacks again to make that work, but still. Even as a project unrelated to getting around jamming, that would be a neat piece of tech.
Another approach would be to do what insects do and use optical flow. Essentially look at how fast the ground is moving to figure how fast the UAS is moving and integrate to figure out where you are. This is exactly how optical mice work, in fact optical mice sensors have even been used to do this. Below is an example of a quadcopter that employs such system.[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbS1N--bT0w
http://reviews.costco.com/2070/100222794/syma-model-aircraft...
The reason I chose it: there are enough dangling light pulls, and when I lose control, enough other stringy things around the edges of the room, that I've damaged props on other mini drones. The cage has effectively eliminated (or at least severely reduced) the problem. I presume a slightly lager drone can have better shielding.
CISCO all ready do some very tasty airnet kit that attacks rouge ap's and hosts.
Also, at multiple GHz (most rc rf links used today are 2.4 GHz (no, I don't mean WLAN)), the waves don't penetrate the skin very well.
Also, Yagi antennas have (not perfectly, of course, but approximately) unidirectional beam patters; that's what the reflector elements at the end are for. The back lobe isn't very strong.
Also, the exposure would be for a very short amount of time.
Many radar operators are exposed to much, much stronger radiation on a continuous basis. Though admittedly, they do get cancer.
And to get range they normally run these blue tooth/wifi sniper rifles much hotter than your consumer wifi AP
PTP you can run 4W
Also, both the consumer hardware 100mW limit and the 4W PTP limit are EIRP (in the US; apparently; I'm from Germany), so the gains don't matter. And you achieve them with very directional antennas (which are hard to aim by hand), not with a strong transmitter.
Radio range is not the problem at all when aiming by eye - because your target is small, it's line of sight, and the pilot is likely not using a very strong transmitter and a very directional antenna.
In a sense it would reduce the amount of airspace being utilised by many wireless clients (as they couldn't connect) but it can only do this by bombarding the same airspace with disconnect messages, thereby contributing to the problem it is attempting to solve (cramped airspace).
Even if that sort of laser for sale at a reasonable cost, you probably don't want or need one for killing drones. If you've escalated to actually blowing the drone out of the sky, you might as well use a gun. Guns are great at that and they're much cheaper. The bullets and shot you fire into the air do pose a safety risk on the way back down, but if reasonable steps are taken it's probably not a big enough deal to justify using a laser instead. (Caveat: in dense urban areas it's very difficult to even begin taking those "reasonable steps" and firing anything into the air is a recipe for tragedy. If you're seriously looking to take out a drone in a city, a laser makes a lot more sense.)
Another downside is that the laser needs to be held on its target to work, and that's a pain in the ass when the target is a drone. Even a relatively stable model flown by a skilled operator is still going to bob and weave, and the drone is presumably not hovering perfectly still while you're trying to break it. Today, hitting that target once with a shotgun is probably easier than holding a laser on it for the amount of time you'd need.
In the future, that will probably not remain true. Lasers (or really any devices that emit energy in a tight beam) are inherently better long-range direct-fire weapons than firearms because the laser moves in a straight line and you can get it to go farther. Travel time is pretty obviously another area where lasers win. As laser technology improves, we'll see more powerful lasers that can do damage in less time and automated platforms for doing the aiming. A future scenario where militaries use automated energy weapons against unmanned aircraft is very realistic, so a future scenario where a police officer shoots down a drone with a laser is certainly within the realm of possibility.