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Comment by eponeponepon | Hacker News Reader

I kind of struggle to understand how there isn't enough equipment and electrical engineering expertise on site at a modern airport to pinpoint these drones really quickly - especially at Heathrow.

Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?

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> Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?

Brush motors sure, brush sparks are nasty EM interference sources. Brushless motors by design don't emit this kind of RF noises, only the motor controllers.

But in any case the power levels are hovering on the undetectable given all the noise from the airplanes, the radar systems, computers, cellphones, ...

It really would not take long for the airport to launch a drone to look for the other one. Maybe a minute? They could have a experienced pilot on staff at the tower. Costs a lot less than shutting down the airport for hours.

I would even say a skilled pilot with a trackable drone in communication with the tower could safely fly to investiage without a shutdown of the airport.

Then they get lots of calls from other people saying they’ve seen it and it’s actuslly the search and destroy drone...

But upstream the assumption was

>Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?

So once you have an effective and objective mechanism (this or other) for detecting and tracking drones, you can disregard the peanut gallery.

How would launching a drone help you look for another one if you don't know where it is? At least when you're looking from ground level you can be sure the drone is above you.

Tracking/jamming equipment is available [1] (and pretty cool).

[1] https://www.aaronia.com/products/solutions/Aaronia-Drone-Det...

I suspect the last thing you want to do in the vicinity of one of the busiest airports in the world is to start jamming frequencies?

Yes, but not at well defined frequencies, and it's competing with every other laptop fan, vacuum cleaner, refrigerator, sliding door, and electric stove as a source of RF noise.

Drones are likely flying around in pretty well defined frequencies. And the noise isn’t a problem because the receivers are receiving.

Noise is definitely a problem for receivers.

Yes but it’s one they deal with quite happily. Because the bandwidth of the receiver is tiny.

I wonder if you could use sound rather than RF? Have a grid of microphones pointed at the sky and horizon.

This approach might work at short distances out in the desert, but in an airport or city? Good luck. The noise floor is already incredibly high.

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