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New Video Shows Shot Down Drone Hovered For Only 22 Seconds
AmiMoJo writes: The saga of the drone shot down in Kentucky got a little bit longer today. A new video from the drone shot down by William Merideth shows that it only hovered over his property for 22 seconds, and was not "peeping". The video shows the drone hovering at altitude and surveying the area before falling out of the sky. Although the video jumps around a little, the drone's owner claims that it was not edited. The shooter says he did not know if the drone was being operated by a paedophile, criminal or ISIS terrorist before he opened fire.
And, this wasn't the first flight in the area that is within view of the property. FTA:
During its first flight, the Phantom apparently gave an error message and could not fly past this road without a setting change. So, Boggs brought it home, fixed the settings and swapped its battery—giving time for Merideth to go inside, retrieve his shotgun and wait for the drone to return.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
He was arrested for first degree criminal mischief and first degree wanton endangerment. Probably for using a firearm to vandalize private property. When you vandalize someone's stuff, you don't just get to reimburse them and everyone walks away. There are almost always criminal charges involved.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
There are plenty of open spaces where a hobbyist can go to fly their drone without bothering people. Pick any county in the country and do some quick searching and you will find an amateur RC plane group that will hold regular meetings and events. Some areas even have a field designated for amateur flights so that no one interferes with regular flight patterns if they happen to stray above 500 ft.
End of the day, you wouldn't send an RC car out into public places with a video camera attached and expect it to come back unmolested, why would you think a drone is any safer?
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As someone who delivers video systems and RF downlinks for drones and helicopters I see four kinds of artifacts in that video:
1) Yes, rolling shutter artifacts appear to be there, but they're very minor (i.e. distortion in the young man's face in the lower left of the first few frames). It appears that the camera is mounted on a gyro stabilized platform. Overall, I suspect that this may even be a full-frame chip, and what appear to be rolling shutter artifacts are actually due to the high compression. Rolling shutter artifacts are very, very annoying and not tolerated well by most users so rolling shutter video chips are going out of style.
2) Lost/corrupted packets. I'm guessing that this is a VOIP system using UDP packets, and you can see some glitches in rows of pixels, like at 0:13 above the horizon to the left. These are often accompanied by 3) and seem to be a predecessor of 4).
3) Compression artifacts. This is probably MPEG-4 of some kind, and you can see the bit rate is rather low because of the blockiness and persistence of bad blocks caused by lost/corrupted packets. The bit rate is low most likely because the RF link won't support a higher one...
4) Lost Link artifacts. These are the most obvious ones, and run from brief ones less than a frame long, which produce the top-down partial-screen "wipes" to ones that last several frames or even several seconds, which look like full-frame "wipe" edits. These are almost certainly caused by loss of radio link from the drone to the ground. The recording software isn't substituting blank pixels or frames, it's just picking up where it left off when it gets the video stream back. Aesthetically, it's probably the best way to go, but if you're collecting something you expect may need to be forensic evidence, it does inconveniently make the video look like it's been edited.
If I were called in to testify on this video clip, I'd say my opinion is that the wipes are caused solely by loss of link, but the video could have purposefully been edited to appear that way.
As for why it jumps so much? His RF Link sucks. Either he's not orienting his antennas correctly (calibrate your magnetometers if you're using gimbaled antennas! Your fixed omnis should stay vertical!) or he's using very high gain omnis at too short a range, or both. Higher gain omnis have deeper nulls at zenith and nadir. (It may seem tempting to the layman, but you don't point your ground station omni at the aircraft - if you're gonna actively aim the antenna, then it should stay perpendicular to your drone.) Finally, he's probably operating in the 2.5GHz ISM band, which in a suburban area like that is probably quite noisy with WiFi and microwave oven interference. Switch to a 5GHz system, it may still be noisy, but at least you don't have all that energy from a magnetron in every home and business spewing radiation intended for hot pockets, leftover mac and cheese, and that fish somebody brings every day for lunch.
I can see the fnords!
First flight mode, 100 feet restriction. Happens every time you update your firmware or you use a new device.
Well, that is not actually correct -
"In that case the court held that a plane flying just 83 feet in the air—the commotion was literally scaring the plaintiff’s chickens to death—represented an invasion of property. The justices declined to precisely define the height at which ownership rights end. Today, the federal government considers the area above 500 feet to be navigable airspace in uncongested areas. While the Supreme Court hasn’t explicitly accepted that as the upper limit of property ownership, it’s a useful guideline in trespass cases. Therefore, unless you own some very tall buildings, your private airspace probably ends somewhere between 80 and 500 feet above the ground."
Source:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Dummies Article on the Topic:
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/...
Google Search With Many Articles:
https://www.google.com/search?...
What does all of this say - the Supreme Court has ruled you own at least 83 feet above your property. So no, all airspace is definitely not public. Hopefully this will lead towards a new ruling which will legal define how much airspace you own; opposed to it being left in a legal grey area for heights between 83 feet and 500 feet.
Actually, it's the Lord's Resistance Army (a Christian terrorist group) that currently holds the title for kidnapping and raping pre-teen and young teens in Africa. Boo Haram is just a wannabe in comparison.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
put up lighted signs saying that anyone coming to look at you will be shot then.
and stay in your house. maybe buy some southern states flags while at it through amazon and make an exception to not shoot at the delivery guy who looks at your house and box while delivering it.
sometimes some americans seem to think that they're in a warzone.
(really if you're that concerned about someone peeping at you, just call the cops)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If this is all information the drone owner has to go with, I want to know how he figured out who shot the drone down? It appeared to be in range of any number of homes. Something doesn't smell right about this.
From the original story (and according to the home owner who shot it down), the drone owners drove to where they thought it went down and upon arriving, they were threatened by the home owner. He told them that he shot it down and that he would shoot them too, if they tried to retrieve the drone. So, I think it was kind of obvious that the guy who was pointing a shot gun at them and threatening to kill them was probably responsible.
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