The Anti-Drone Drone | Hacker News Reader

The Anti-Drone Drone

scientificamerican.com

42 pointsgipton39 comments

Any RF engineers know how feasible it would be to take a yagi or other directional antenna and put it on a gun stock and make an RF jammer that could be directed at drones?

I was once testing a quadrotor that we built for IED detection with a group of marines, and we discovered that the metal detectors that the IED teams were carrying were able to completely fry our electronics from a couple of feet away. I'm guessing the power required to do this from 100s of feet away is significant, and the FCC doesn't take kindly to these sort of activities, but it doesn't seem crazy if you only need a short but intense burst.

I worked with the team that built metal detectors used by the USMC (possibility not the ones you used - there were a number of different kinds in use), and I'm very very surprised they fry anything. They are based on CE certified consumer detectors, which have to pass pretty strict emissions tests.

I could imagine some interference though.

I would imagine taking apart a microwave oven and pointing the magnetron waveguide into a parabolic dish could give you a decent drone killer - a cheap, compact AC powered 1 kW 2.4 Ghz jammer should do some damage.

You would have to make sure you don't get in the beam - you could give your self some nasty burn/radiation injuries with that set up

And the FCC would be having a word with you they don't allow civilians to run things that hot you'd be looking at 20-24 dbi

I obviously wouldn't recommend doing this without proper RF safety training and experience.

Regarding the FCC: Assuming a nice narrow pencil-beam aimed at space, would they care much?

Doubt it, but getting a pencil beam is nigh impossible with radio, there's going to be leakage somewhere. Also, you'd have a bunch of physicists asking about how you got a beam that thin.

I haven't actually done the math, but for a parabolic dish which is much larger than the waveguide diameter, shouldn't you get a very narrow beam? Isn't that how microwave uplinks like the Ubiquiti airFibre5 can give you wireless networks at gigabit speeds over hundreds of kilometers?

Running a slightly hot 200mw pcmia card for warflying or war rocketing probably not but I think 1.2kw with a gain of 20 from the antenna they might.

What about skipping the RF jamming and frying the electronics just like the IED teams did.

Maggie Jauregui did a talk at defcon about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT9LwyjpfzI

Wired did a write up about that talk: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/this-hackers-radio-can-fry-your...

Related: US Navy already have a real laser gun that was shown melting down an approaching UAV.

It's struck me for some time that it's clear that drones should be fairly easy to take down, and it must be one of the difficulties that e.g. Amazon is facing in deploying delivery drones. All you need is a well-placed net. Is this solution really any better than a simple T-shirt cannon?

If they can fly high and relatively fast it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Also, keep in mind that the drones can have cameras and broadcast your takedown attempt. There could also be some automatic evasive actions programmed in there.

A more wide ranging article: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2165007...

Sounds like I'm going to need an Anti Anti Drone Drone.

Just some small laser that can fry the cam.

Next thing we're going to have airborne battle bot competitions.

Maker Faire 2014

http://www.tested.com/tech/robots/461486-maker-faire-2014-mu...

The my inner 12-year-old would be so thrilled to watch that happen! It does seem like an inevitability.

RC planes have always culminated to this point. I need to get my battle drone ready for competition....

Would love to see that big, heavy hex trying to catch a 250mm quad on a 6S LiPo, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxU4GdlTHDg

Would only have to get close enough - and then use some recoilless gun to disable the target - maybe have two short barrelled guns firing shot gun shells in opposite direction

Near people? That seems extremely reckless

Assuming you engage in the air not that much

"Not that much" is too much when a single person gets hit by a random shell.

Fleets of drones are the only solution. And then: Drone-making drones! And then: Drone-parts-harvesting-drones!

Only then can we have the drone wars we deserve.

And then they start making paperclips.

Diamond Age, here we come.

Toner wars, right?

You beat me to it!

Considering the small size of civilian drones and their mostly plastic composition, such air combat antics are entirely superfluous - light lasers will handle airspace interdiction nicely & cheaply.

Right to the moment where someone mounts a bunch of mirrors and your offensive laser gets briefly reflected somewhere it really shouldn't go (random eyes, flammable stuff, ...)

And whose head will this drone crash to?

In 2016, the must-have feature of a drone will be anti-anti-drone.

Why would you need an anti-anti-drone if your drone wasn't doing anything dubious in the first place? Who's going to attack it with an anti-drone?

Drones seem to be one of the most polarising new technologies. On the one hand, they have the potential for numerous beneficial applications. Just a few that I've seen seriously proposed or actually implemented are:

- searching large areas or dangerous locations for survivors after a natural disaster

- improving farming efficiency

- (my personal favourite so far) transporting an AED to a patient having a heart attack much quicker than any ground-based emergency vehicle can get there

- delivering more everyday items like books or groceries in the on-line shopping era.

Obviously there are practical concerns around safety and efficiency, but hopefully in time we'll develop good ways to address those.

On the other hand, there are inevitably people lining up who want to use the same technologies to build more powerful weapons or more effective surveillance systems. All of the usual concerns about the ethics of those applications arise. And then all of the usual concerns about corrupting the otherwise beneficial applications in order to turn drones into threats or surveillance tools even though those devices were never created with such intentions will arise as well.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a kind of drone/anti-drone arms race for a while in those cases, particularly if non-military organisations like police forces and local councils start routinely and ubiquitously deploying these tools in civilian environments. I suspect that if they do then it will work against them in the long run, in the same way that mass surveillance on-line has prompted technological counter-measures that probably do make it harder for genuine security service investigations to monitor legitimate surveillance targets in some cases.

In some ways, I think the bigger danger will be the corruption/mission creep problem. For example, large-scale drone "postal systems" might develop, and maybe they'll offer much more efficiency and/or be more environmentally friendly than today's driver-and-van networks. On the other hand, if they also happen to fly around people's properties with high resolution cameras recording all the time, they make concerns about Google's Street View or local authority CCTV camera networks look like child's play. The answer here is probably better transparency and regulation, but we aren't very good at either of those right now, so again I could see the potential for a lot of people being upset and a few (but probably enough) of them being willing to take direct action in response, legal or otherwise.

IMHO it will be very unfortunate if that's the way our culture goes, but in this of all issues I could see the technology becoming shunned because of fear (legitimate or otherwise) of abuse.

I was just joking... Take it easy.

It looks like the quad getting ensared is a DJI Phantom. While a net will do the job, all you really need to mess a Phantom within wifi range is a copy of SSH.

Important design aspect: making sure that during or after capture no objects fall out of the sky.

This isn't an article, it's a paragraph!

..and it somehow managed to get to FP

we should stop upvoting such clickbaits

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