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UAV Operator Blames Hacking For Malfunction That Injured Triathlete
jaa101 (627731) writes "The owner of a drone which fell and reportedly hit an athlete competing in a triathlon in Western Australia's Mid West has said he believes the device was 'hacked' into."
From the article: "Mr Abrams said an initial investigation had indicted that someone nearby "channel hopped" the device, taking control away from the operator. ... Mr Abrams said it was a deliberate act and it would be difficult to determine who was responsible as something as common as a mobile phone could be used to perform a channel hop. The videographer added that there had been a similar incident when the drone was flown earlier in the day."
Hi All
Australia does not have any unlicensed spectrum, at least not between 9 KHz and almost to daylight. 2.4 GHz is a licensed frequency, covered by what is called a Class License. This provides the ability for equipment that meets the technical requirements to be automatically licensed. One of the requirements of the Class License, as noted by the ACMA (www.acma.gov.au), is that you must accept any interference from other parties.
What this means is that you cannot require anyone to not operate on the same frequency as you. They can use their own transmitters, and you cannot stop them. If they want to use a wireless video sender on the same frequency, wiping you out, this is not an issue.
This is why major sporting events stay away from unlicensed frequencies as much as possible. During the Sydney Olympics, I had six helicopters for TV coverage. Video signals were all on licensed frequencies in the 2.5 and 5 GHz ranges, and GPS tracking, telemetry and communications was in the 520 MHz range. Cell phone devices were not used, and are still mostly not used due to frequency congestion. As an aside, during a test, we used telemetry frequency a few MHz lower, but found the GPS was not working well. Turns out 3 x frequency + IF frequency was slap bang in the middle of the GPS transmissions.
Darryl