Slashdot Mirror
Almost 1 In 3 US Warplanes Is a Drone
parallel_prankster writes "A recent Congressional Research Service report, titled U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems, looks at the more-prominent role being played by drones. In 2005, drones made up just 5 percent of the military's aircraft. Today one in three American military aircraft is a drone. The upsides of drones are that they are cheaper and safer — the military spent 92% of the aircraft procurement money on manned aircraft. The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War."
Is this a legitimate comparison?
I mean, Lego is reportedly the world's #1 tire manufacturer, just based on the number of tires it produces, but it's not exactly an automotive powerhouse.
They ran a piece last summer tracking down a 1940s drone. It had a new-fangled invention called a TV camera that weighed 100 pounds at that time. The operator had to be in line-of-sight.
Actually, one needs to be a commissioned officer, Captain last time I checked to be flying a drone (for the Air Force at least).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
It's utter bullshit offcourse. Some journalist probably mistook frequency-used for data-transmitted or something along those lines.
Flight-data (speed, position, velocity, status) is a tiny trickle of data, the only data that are significant is when transmitting live-video, which not all drones do 100% of the time. And even when they do, it's not 500MB/s. Full-HD-video from a blueray-player is on the order of 35 megabit/second, thus 500 MB/s would be the equivalent of streaming around 100 HD-cameras in blueray-quality-video.
That's not what's happening. The number is bullshit.
From THIS article:
To demonstrate the concept, Northrop Grumman's test team developed and installed on Global Hawk a new 1.4 terabyte (1500 gigabyte) computer server capable of storing all of the imagery and sensor data recorded during a complete Global Hawk mission.
With a 42 hour mission time that computes to just under 10MB/s or approximately 80Mb/s bandwidth. That sounds more reasonable.
I'm not sure where the submitter gets his 500MB/s from, but as others suggest it's probably 500Mb/s.
However, you might say 500Mb/s is still a tad much, however I have a good idea why it might be that high.
First, a drone typically doesn't have just a single camera. It'd be a bit of a waste to get cheap there really, when you can put three or four cameras per drone.
Second, I can imagine military regulations dictate that judging kill orders based on compressed live images from a shaky drone isn't good enough. Has to be a raw data stream to ensure the best possible information is available.
These are of course just my thoughts and I don't have any experience or insider knowledge to back them up with.
which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
As a Gulf War vet who worked with the communication network at the time, that "500 percent" metric is pointless. In 1991, we were still playing games on Commodore 64's. Hardly anything in our military inventory was networked, and what little was, was largely special-purpose point-to-point equipment. Is 5x the bandwidth of a pre-internet era war supposed to be impressive? Quick, tell us how much more bandwidth it was than we used in World War 2!
On page 17 of the actual report (page 22 of the PDF file), it says "a single Global Hawk...'requires 500Mbps bandwidth...'" So yes, somewhere between there and the Wired story, someone miscapitalized the B. That statistic is cited within the report as being from the Department of the Navy.
The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
I think the downside is that the drones are used in "secret" CIA wars, routinely kill civilians, have been used by the President for extra-judicial assassination of at least one American citizen, and are increasingly eyed for use in domestic airspace. I'd put their bandwidth usage pretty far down on the list of reasons to be concerned about drones.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Or it isn't just video, but a stream from a complete sensor package. Not to mention the cameras they have deliver much higher resolution video than the HD streamed on Netflix (or at least I'd hope).
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
No, it is the USA. So it would be an Imperial Shitload. Anyway, total BS.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's neither 500 megabytes/s nor even 500 megabits/s. There is no link capability in the U.S. space communications systems, or even anywhere, that could handle that reliably from just one drone, never mind multiple drones at the same time. That drone would need a big effing antenna to push that much data over a couple dozen thousand kilometers to the space segment. Let's get real: do the /. editors have no sense of magnitude at all?!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP
Also when they started arming the drones. Originally they were scout-only.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Mod my parent post down, please. It's pretty much all factually inaccurate and corrected in responses (which should be modded up). To summarise, USAF drones are controlled from Nevada and not close by, Wikipedia states sensor packages report back 50Mb/s of data to local ground forces, or the operator by satellite, and there is no evidence of the UAV aquired by IraN being downed by GPS spoofing.
Thanks to those posting corrections.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Actually only for take off and landings. It is the latency issue that causes them to have local pilots for take off and landings.
it is funny but I was talking to a friend of mine that worked on drones about two years ago and he told me the same thing.
Bandwidth is and will be an issue for a long time to come. You only have X amount of spectrum in which to transmit data. That is why AEW aircraft take controllers with them instead of beaming the data back to some command center.
Bandwidth gets tricky when you get past LOS range and satellites introduce real latency issues.
Also their is not proof that Iran brought down that drone by spoofing GPS. It is actually very unlikely that they did. Drones use encrypted GPS and it is not very likely that Iran broke the encryption keys. It is far more likely that the drone had a problem and came down.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
F35? No, is a too ambitious money sinkhole. But an A-10, F-18, maybe an F-14? Yes, you will need. UAVs are good for many things, but you must remember that they also have obvious weaknesses, as the recent case shown in Iran. You can't fly a UAV against a competent enemy with ECM.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Perhaps bandwidth should never have been rated in bits per second in the first place? I blame my CompSci/IT predecessors (and marketing people, no doubt). I think they wanted a bigger number, and 300 bits per second sounded more impressive for that modem they designed than 37.5 bytes per second.
But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.
Also, most people think of data in terms of bytes - they buy hard drives in bytes (well, gigabytes and terrabytes), RAM, USB flash drives, sd cards for their phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics. In fact, bandwidth is the only place we still talk about bits instead of bytes, and that's ridiculous. It needs to change and the bits per second standard needs to die.
However, he translated 500Mbps (megaBITS per second) to megabytes per second. 500Mbps is actually closer to 62.5MB/s -- still a lot compared to residential bandwidth in the US, but not half a terabyte every second.
So he doesn't know bits from bytes and you don't know giga from tera, but together you're dynamite ;)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My wife's 2+ year old, off-the-shelf Canon 7D takes 18 megapixel images. RAW file size is 20+ MB and it can shoot bursts of 12+ images in under 2 seconds. That's 120 megabytes/second (bursted) from consumer grade gear. I imagine the CIA/DOD can afford much better gear that captures much more data than a single $1700 DSLR. I also assume one drone can carry multiple devices. As far as data transmission, I would bet that being loss-less and encrypted take much higher priority than compression. I would love to hear the number for the total amount of data gathered by drones monitoring the OBL strike. Hopefully I will still be here in 50 years.