Consumer drone gear is very easy to jam, also easier to foxhunt (RF location hunting) so it works both ways.
That being said I wonder if you could control small drones over satellite or if that is a $900 solution to a 99 cent problem.
The more promising areas are optical communications (but this has issues with fog and atmospheric attenuation), or directional antennas. Like, a yagi on a gimbal constantly pointed at the control station.
Alternatively, send gps guided drones with optical targeting. If the jamming system has inadequate air defenses, it might not be jamming for long.
That's an arms race with exactly one step.
If you're using a commercial system, then you're using FHSS across the whole of the 2.4GHz ISM band for your control link and most of the 5.8GHz band for digital VTX. If you're designing a system for military applications, then either you use SDR to go frequency agile across everything from VHF to the S or C band, or you're in the wrong job. The Nash equilibrium is for everyone to use all practical frequencies all of the time and the technology to do that is largely mature.
>Directional antennas can emit RF in the direction of the enemy, but not your own assets.
How directional? If it's very directional, then you've got a drone gun, which relies on you being able to see and track incoming drones. If you can see and track, you've already solved the hard part and making a hard kill is comparatively easy. If it isn't especially directional, then you've created a conical area of denial that is only marginally more problematic for your enemy than for yourself and still fairly easy to triangulate.
There is maybe a viable strategy of coordinating the frequency hopping of your jammers and your drones and using a distributed network of low-cost jamming transmitters to avoid painting a target on your own back, but it's well beyond the technological capabilities or the budget of either Russia or Ukraine. I have no doubt that DARPA are working on something along those lines, but the base rate probability of a DARPA project actually getting to the battlefield is fairly low.
For my money, the near-future of counter-drone technology is kinetic. The Flakpanzer Gepard was considered obsolete a decade ago, but it's arguably the most valuable asset in the Ukrainian arsenal for dealing with drone threats. Most current hard-kill active protection systems should be fairly straightforward to upgrade to reliably deal with loitering munitions.
And yeah, the most effective way of avoiding EF friendly fire is spread spectrum communication where the jammer is synchronized to avoid the frequencies being used for communications. But that can be tricky to set up, since you have potentially many different radio systems with their own spread spectrum scheme.
1. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/antenna_theory/images/uni_dir...
This is both a fantastic line and wisdom.
And the drone is too small to be intercepted with missile.
FPV drone costs 500-1000$ now and is the game changer in the current war. No ground offensive operation can be maid now without great loses.