Feds warn China-made drones pose risk to US critical infrastructure

I actually bought a cheapo chinese drone, works well, works a little too well. I get curious... It is supposed to work on 802.11 (according to the FCC filing) but it has exceptional range which wasn't matching up to my expectations. I do scans, nothing, it isn't operating on wifi.

Break out the spectrum analyzer and it is actually operating on wifi just on channel 14 but the mystery goes deeper from there because as it turns out they are using a RTL chipset with a heavily modified firmware that I suspect modifies the wireless stack to hide it, violate rf power limits and I am not quite sure what else. I dumped the flash and I have the modified kernel module they are using I just haven't gotten around to poking at it.

Edit to add: Also I've only worked on the controller so far, I am very fascinated to see what I find on drone side.