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Comment by ferros | Hacker News Reader

While I'm always excited by reading these articles, my mind always goes back to the boring problems like privacy and noise.

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Wife and I were sitting in the car, windows down, eating chinese takeout on Bridgeway in Sausalito....dinner with a view, and a movie of quiet walking tourists speaking various languages as they pointed up at the precarious homes on the steep hills. Blissful dinner and strolls were rudely interrupted by a drone following a slow-moving car...everyone was startled, all attention on the drone as it crept along the road. Wife and I concluded in felt completely invasive. NOT looking forward to drones.

I would like to see some independent measurements of the noise levels throughout the entire proposed flight envelope.

(assuming worst case in terms of noise output below)

I can't imagine this is going to be something that people will be willing to tolerate if it occurs asynchronously throughout the day. I can handle the UPS/Fedex trucks going around once a day. The garbage trucks twice a week at a fairly specific time each morning. But a drone showing up at any arbitrary point of the day based on when someone placed an order? I don't think I could handle this.

This could’ve been written when first cars appeared too. Nobody will focus on drones when they are common, same as nobody focuses on cars driving by. There are techniques to reduce noise by special wing design or making larger rotors (similar to how a larger fan in the computer is quieter) or even redirecting noise upwards (https://dronebelow.com/2018/11/06/dotterel-technologies-rais...).

People are focusing on cars though, and many are looking forward to electric cars because they're less noisy.

Just because the noise battle was lost against cars at least temporarily doesn't mean people don't care.

Or that "people can't learn from mistakes"

And the issue of cheap commercial off the shelf hardware being able to deliver a 1.5kg bomb or a gun anywhere within 10km with pinpoint accuracy also strikes me when I ses these. With a good camera and some image recognition, autonomous assasins arent sci-fi any more. It’s economically and technically within reach not just for non-state actors but individuals now. That has got to have some implications.

I have no idea how loud these things are but I suspect that they would be less noisy than a typical UPS/Fedex truck.

If I'm in range of an EV drone, it's very likely I'm in range of an EV truck. The truck doesn't have to hover. So I would suspect the opposite - perhaps even compared to an idling diesel truck - because drone props tend to sit right in the really irritating whining spot of the spectrum.

I can sleep with an idling Diesel engine quite close, even in the vehicle.

Don’t reckon I could sleep with a drone hovering above my house.

A drone whine is high(er) pitched, so it doesn't go through closed windows and doors nearly as much, and the noise is a relatively short range and not supersonic like a helicopter rotor. Diesel truck rumble is low pitched and pretty much goes through everything, closed or not.

And the human perception of higher pitched noises is that they're much more noticeable and much more obnoxious. And when the kid across the street is flying his drone, I can hear it in my living room through my double-paned window. I'd much rather hear the FedEx truck idling than that fucking thing whizzing around - and it's hundreds of feet away!

They fly high enough that the noise is barely above background levels.

That's doubtful. I can hear drones buzzing when they're over 500 feet away, and they're loud enough to be annoying (and those aren't carrying payloads so they are significantly lighter). Are they really using hundreds of feet of cable to drop the packages?

I think this varies significantly depending on drone design. You absolutely can make them quieter, you just have to compromise elsewhere -- for example, using larger props.

This is a large drone to begin with, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's also got wings, so it shouldn't need to spin its engines at full except when it's hovering for a delivery.

I agree with some of what you said, but this is likely to weigh at least 10x as much as the drones I'm talking about when you include a payload of even a few pounds. There is another comment on here from someone in the trial city talking about how the residents complain about the noise. You can't beat physics.

I was worried about this too. I recently got a newest gen DJI drone, and was self conscious about flying it for this very reason.

Turns out, with the quiet propellers installed it disappears into the urban background hum when it's 30m up in the air. I've also flown it in uninhabited wilderness (national park, two days hike to nearest anything) and even there it's about 80-100.

Add any horizontal distance and you will find it very hard to locate the drone after looking down at the controller (at least until you get better at flying it and develop better spatial awareness).

there are simple solutions for minimizing drone noise :)

Sadly, shotguns within city limits must remain secure inside your vehicle...trying to figure out a more legal and safer way.

Probably not legal but definitely safer:

http://jammers4u.com/drones-jammer

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