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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

It detects drones which send out RF signals at the same frequency band. Most drones used in Ukraine are tethered with thin optical wire exactly because one of the first anti-drone measures was to simply jam them at the frequencies the operators used.

There are some more advanced anti-drone measures at work: Like blasting them with directed high-energy microwaves to destroy the circuits.

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Most drones aren't optical because optical drones sacrifice payload and distance, they're only used when broad spectrum jamming is expected. Jamming of that type is expensive and heavy enough that infantry probably won't be jamming, or light vehicles, or a lot of infrastructure.

Most light vehicles are jamming, and infantry at least have detection capability, which is why fibre is now the standard for close range.

Frequency hopping is not THAT difficult.

Brute force wide band jamming would be easy too and would make hopping ineffective. Unless drones use self tuning antennas to overcome losses, they can't hop too far away from the antenna resonance frequency, which makes jammers job easier.

Jamming broadband is a lot more energy expense than frequency hopping. Orders of magnitude.

But the jammer can be plugged in to the grid or a diesel generator. Being on the ground without flight requirements grants access to such resources.

But such a jammer is expensive and a magnet for HARMs that only need that RF signature as guidance.

Which is a completely unrelated to what we were talking about.

How is SEAD unrelated to drone warfare? Unless you believe anti radiation missiles/drones can't target jammers.

The topic was energy expense of wideband vs narrowband jamming.

Both can be used for targeting.

Yes. That makes it fat, expensive and vulnerable target. There are videos of them being blown up regularly.

Which is a completely unrelated to what we were talking about.

How come? It plainly negates the "easy" part. It's not easy at all, you need to scale your signal path to the magnitude of power. I.e. the expensive part.

I mean, drones trailing fiber optic cables are widely documented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone

So I’m pretty sure avoiding jamming by a military adversary is not trivial, even with frequency hopping and suchlike.

FPV drones in the Russian war are generally pretty dumb devices, there's usually no frequency hopping involved to begin with. They have a lot more in common with baby monitors than with modern military comms.

Lol, even baseline DJI drone chipsets from a decade ago do frequency hopping. Many baby monitors probably do too.

You can literally see the analog video links in countless thousands of published recordings. Nobody really does the hopping with analog video.

From early in the war, sure.

True, but they can't use directional antennas nor lots of power, and once they're far enough from the transmitter inverse square law does the rest. Ground stations always have an advantage because of higher gain antennas and more power available.

So what? It's not the airborne platform with limited energy and an explosive payload that needs to do the jamming, it's the ground-based targets.

However, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread a lot of these jamming arguments are academic because drones are either tethered with a fiberoptic cable and/or navigating autonomously.

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