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Point-And-Shoot Weapon Stops Drones Without Destroying Them
An anonymous reader writes: Unmanned aerial vehicles — so-called drones — can be helpful, malicious, or simply disruptive, depending on the intentions of those who use them. But while regular folks have to be worried about law suits if they shoot one down, law enforcement officers have a better solution, and one that's currently legal (for them): stop one mid-flight. This can be achieved with DroneDefender, a recently made available "gun" that uses radio control frequency disruption technologies to safely stop drones in the air, before they can pose a threat to military or civilian safety.
This will work until the drones are equipped with some rudimentary autonomous controls that will take over when the control signal is lost.
It'll just follow its "panic-mode" programming and fly a direct course back to its origin, or loiter far enough away to be out of range of the hostile jamming.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Or, most importantly, record police doing things that could make for bad PR.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Shooting high intensity RF through a pointable device? One that could also be pointed at, oh I dunno, that annoying a-hole talking too loud on his phone? Or that cop chasing you for whatever reason?
Not to mention the hazards of having 20 lb of plastic and steel falling several feet out of the sky onto who knows what?
Prolly won't work for a lot of them anyway, if they lose signal they're programmed to head home.
I see fail in a lot of different areas on this one.
might work on other things, too.
FTA:
"It does so by either disrupting remote control or GPS navigation."
By the looks of the device, it has a 2.4GHz yagi antenna, which would mean that it simply saturates the device with a 2.4GHz signal. What about drones flying spread spectrum 480MHz, or even 5.8GHz? And that antenna won't cover the GPS frequencies, either.
Face it, this is simply a tool to stop DJI Phantom drones and similar products. Nothing to see here.
* Police block remote-control of a legally-operated drone.
* Drone falls to earth and crashes
* Drone destroyed
* 3rd parties suffer injury or property loss due to impact
Who is financially liable for the drone's destruction?
Who is financially liable for the damages to 3rd parties?
On the other hand, if the drone is on a mission of wanton destruction and the police know it and fail to shoot it down because they fear civil liability, people will be in an uproar.
But what if the police either sincerely but falsely believe the drone is on a mission of wanton destruction and shoot it down under the "exigent circumstances" or "protecting the public" doctrines?
What if the police just say they sincerely believed it but the real reason they shot it down was that they were just ticked off that there was a drone in the air that they didn't control?
As for the last two questions - how can any judge, jury, or court tell the two apart, assuming the officers involved don't have any known history of lying? Answer: In most if not all cases, they can't.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Because nothing prevents an accident like suddenly not being in control of your car at 80 miles per hour.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
There is a complete unknown as to what the drone will do when it loses it's control signal. Some are configurable: Return to home, stay in place, land in place, fly to a pre-defined destination, and that's assuming anything is set at all and it won't fall out of the sky and crash.
Then there's a question of if the drone is actually capable of autonomous flight at all at the current time. I had a problem with the inertial control system and compass on my drone on one flight. It went crazy and started flying off quickly into the distance, flicking it to full manual I was able to fly it home however given it's batshit crazy response if my controller would have dropped out it would have tried to return home autonomously and who knows where it would have attempted to fly / crash.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Even the old Ronco "Pocket Fisherman", an old staple of late night television advertising, could do an effective task against most drones at moderate range.
From the youtube link:
this is a simulation of our DroneDefender.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I've been wondering when we'd start hearing about homemade HERF guns being used for this, but those would be a lot more likely to do actual damage I suspect.
Both this device and any theoretical HERF gun would also be potentially troublesome in the most common off-limits areas which are around airports. I'd hate to seem something like this used to take down a troublesome drone and inadvertently swamp local radar coverage.
fencepost
just a little off
Most drones/RCs are controlled with the 430 or 480 MHz band. 2.4/5.8 is typically for data uplink for video and such.
Only idiot companies (like Phantom who put all of their crap in the microwave bands) will have their product affected by this device (or not given 1W is the maximum allowed transmission power feed to the antenna in the FCC rule book for these frequency ranges, and I'll bet this thing goes way over that so the FCC will say "No, you can't do this.")
To boot, it's illegal to advertise jamming devices of this nature. Start pressing the FCC to put Battele out of business.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You'd want to only do it in situations like country roads at night. No other traffic on the road, and the police can pull the bodies out of the wreckage in daylight the next morning. We live on a 45 mph county highway and when the rednecks are out whizzing past at 80 mph at 3 AM is when something that dramatically 'stops' them would be useful.
...it's the rapid deceleration event upon encounter with the ground that does it.
HERF pulse guns have been around on sites like this for a long time now. DroneDefender haven't exactly invented anything new, they have just repackaged in a format more palatable to Law Enforcement and Military.
If I let it drop out of the sky onto the pavement, it's effectively destroyed. It wouldn't make much difference to me if someone blasted it with buckshot or not, as I have a lot of broken stuff to replace.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
After it's disabled we can repurpose it to, say, drive a combine.