Heathrow installs anti-drone system that can locate UAV pilots | Hacker News Reader

Heathrow installs anti-drone system that can locate UAV pilots

bloomberg.com

61 pointslxm42 comments

I could make a 2 meter wingspan drone (plane) for under 1000 dollars. That drone will have a range of about 200km. An avarage airspeed of 100km/u and payload capacity of 5kg. It flies autonomously using GPS. It still can (to a lesser degree) without by using barometer and compass. You can use special equipment to spoof or disrupt GPS signals. But no way that will work on long distances. My point is. If you want to fly over an airport and drop a bag of eggs it's perfectly possible. Even with all the counter measures taken at such places.

Sure, but if only 50 people in the country ordered a rare Model X drone with a Model Y flight controller and a Model Z battery, the net could close in pretty quickly. Especially if your environmentalist views are on record.

On the other hand, if you used a mass-produced bestselling drone, tracking you down will be a heck of a lot more difficult.

What controls do state actors in Britain have over otherwise banal tech orders from China, in order to trace them post hoc?

Depends how much they cared, I'd wager. GCHQ operate a "full take" surveillance apparatus, so the data is certainly there.

Honestly, I assumed you'd order the parts from a UK retailer.

I think you could quite easily make something out of generic parts. The traditional material for remote control planes is tissue paper and balsa wood. The controller could almost certainly be made with a generic micro-controller, and battery cells are more or less the same whether they come from a phone or a drone (afaik).

I know you’re trying to drive home a point and i agree, but is this really feasible for under $1,000? I’d estimate something with these capabilities would be in the $20,000 range at a minimum.

I used to dabble in model aircraft. A 'drone' is just a computerized one. I could regularly cobble one together for a few hundred, most of that being electronics. The body was balsa wood with shrink film covering, super cheap. Not everything has to be titanium and carbon fiber. Nowdays, the electronics are cheaper than ever, and can be strapped to many homebuilt craft with little issue. This all ignores vto style crafts, which I am unaware of. The hard part is training your control system, but once calibrated decently you are good to go.

The problem is the bar of effort. Bombs are even easier to build, yet few with the will to build one for nefarious purposes seems to be effective in doing so, even with provided materials (without training, see IEDs). Same with guns, tanks and other complex items. Anyone can make a gun from hardware store items, but most criminals will steal one instead. The impulsive instinct that drives most crime seems a burden on complex tasks.

I'm not much of a chemist, but I don't think bombs are particularly easy to build. I do a bit of metal plate etching, and I've found multiple times that useful chemicals (specifically nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide) are pretty tricky to get hold of, because assholes use them to make bombs.

I had a friend who was making black powder as a schoolkid, and he actually had the police turning up at his house to ask questions about his purchasing history - which is a small sample, but it fits with the basic intuition about how you'd stop people from building bombs: make non-household bomb-making stuff impossible to get hold as a private individual, then just monitor people that make weird purchases of the chemicals that remain.

Yes it is. For about 150 you get an empty airframe. 200 for batteries. 200 for all electronics (flight controller, GPS, receivers etc) . 100 for servos. 100 for wires, connectors etc. 200 for motors and esc. You need a radio sender and a laptop as well. I have build many long range uav's. Compared to 10 years ago the landscape changed a lot.

That sounds fascinating. What sort of control/GIS software do you use on your laptop? Where would you recommend someone interested in this research to get started?

Stm32 flight controllers f3 or f7 with inav on it will do great. Ardupilot can be flashed on most as well. For about 40 you have one. Nice hobby I would say :) check long range fpv on YouTube

Absolutely, flying wings are very efficient and can carry a good amount of batteries. Just on 700mhz video you can go 30+ miles away with full control. If automated much farther.

"Away from transit hubs, common [drone-disabling] solutions include the use of radio waves to jam the signal used by a pilot to control a drone, or take over control of the unit. Other methods include dispatching eagles or giant nets to pull craft out of the sky."

Wait... drone-catching eagles? Is that for real?

If so, I wonder how the eagle's trained how how its target is communicated to it. It's not like drones are an eagle's natural prey.

I'd love to see a video of an eagle catching a drone in action.

> drone-catching eagles? Is that for real?

Yes. It's definitely for real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5DEg2qZzkU

That is amazing. I don't understand how they can not be hurt by the rotors though.

These aren't gas powered or industrial drones, they're used against things like the DJI Phantom. The Eagle's claws are far, far stronger then the blades and the low torq.

They can also be given titanium talons like police dogs, if it becomes necessary.

I’ve been hit by the blade of a DJI Phantom before on the arm. It didn’t break the skin or cause bleeding, but did leave a welt (and was obviously a bit painful).

The Dutch retired their drone eagles. They're not used very often and the upkeep is quite extensive

> use of radio waves to jam the signal used by a pilot to control a drone

Aren't jammers illegal? This could also cause a crash if the drone is being piloted in real time.

Surely any drone pirate worth his/her salt would use a CDMA radio?

No, that's too high latency to control the drone reliably after GPS is jammed (and if it's not jammed, the drone will just return to you when it loses signal anyway).

Radio waves, traveling at the speed of light, have too much latency?

Oh you meant setting up a CDMA base station somewhere, faking a cell tower and controlling the drone that way? I misunderstood, that sounds like a practical and affordable solution that will surely escape detection and be better than a $50 handheld controller.

I wouldn't be so certain that setting up a fake cell tower would escape detection. You'd have people triangulating your position and preparing enormous fines as soon as you turned it on, well before controlling a drone with it.

Unless you were being sarcastic? It's hard to tell on the internet.

I was, yes. You're either using CDMA over the cell network so you can be far away, or you're using a $50 radio that has a 20 KM range itself.

No, I meant both the controller and drones radio use the CDMA modulation technique to transmit at power levels imperceptibly above the background noise levels. A listener would only hear white noise and would not even know the drone/controller are transmitting.

(This is after all what CDMA spread spectrum modulation was invented by Hedy Lamar for)

Absolutely nothing to do with the W-CDMA telephone system.

What's the transmission power for those? Current RC transmitters transmit at 10 mW or so.

Just above the noise floor of each frequency in the band at the time of transmission. Hence undetectable.

Using jammers is illegal without proper permits, I'd assume that government would authorize Heathrow to jam drones. The only illegal activity is by the person flying the drone whom they want to locate and arrest. If the jamming results in the drone crashing, well, that's not an issue - it would be also completely reasonable to directly destroy the drone by physically shooting it out of the air where it should not be.

The funny thing is there is still some debate about whether there actually was a malicious drone flying around Gatwick.

Yeah, I'm not sure I buy this story. Someone with enough experience to build a drone would be unlikely to go bother an airport for no benefit, and some idiot buying a random DJI drone wouldn't be able to get near the airport as DJI drones refuse to fly within a few km of an airstrip.

Can't locate the pilot if the drone is autonomously following GPS waypoints.

Drones still send and receive data from the controller in autonomous modes (the user couldn't cancel the flight otherwise) so they probably still can.

You can build your drone to do whatever you want, including continuing the flight if signal is lost. It's all open source software anyway, and cheaper than a closed-source DJI or whatever.

Not necessarily. Plus drones can easily be controlled over cellular internet.

I don't know about the UK, but where I am it's easy to get a 4G SIM preloaded with data using bogus personal information.

You don't need any personal data in the UK. They're 50p in the shops. You do need to activate them with an over the counter top up though. They accept cash.

I was under the impression most people wanting to be malicious with drones will make them controlled by LTE over the internet so they can be hundreds of miles away.

Looks like it's this system:

http://www.aveillant.com/products/gamekeeper-16u/

https://outline.com/qLzUjp

Url changed from https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/14/heathrow-airport-anti-dr..., which points to this.

The first link wasn't paywalled, but the new link is

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