China's Police Will Shoot Illegal Drones With Radio-Jamming Rifles (mashable.com)

"Police in China are being equipped with new high-tech weaponry to help them fight back against illegal drone use," writes new submitter drunkdrone. Mashable reports: A Chinese city's police department is arming itself with more than 20 drone-jamming rifles...which work by emitting radio signals that force the drones to land, purportedly without damaging them. The drone-killing rifles will be used during the upcoming 2017 Wuhan Marathon, to raise security. Wuhan police demonstrated the drone-killing rifles last week, where they shot down six drones, according to the Chutian Metropolitan Daily.
Each rifle costs $36,265, and has a range of 0.6 miles.

Comments

Sounds expensive.

[fahrbot-bot]

China's Police Will Shoot Illegal Drones With Radio-Jamming Rifles

Wouldn't it be cheaper to shoot the drones using radio-jamming rifles?

Useful.

[SuricouRaven]

You can use them to jam radios and cameras in protester crowds too, to make sure those embarrassing videos don't reach the internet.

Re:Useful.

[OzPeter]

You can use them to jam radios and cameras in protester crowds too, to make sure those embarrassing videos don't reach the internet instantaneously.

FTFY

As long as there is local storage of video, you will never be able to suppress embarrassing videos.

Re:Useful.

[blind biker]

Good point, but the Chinese are actually rather resourceful and will surely realise that they can cover their camera or phone in aluminium foil with apertures for the objective and the focus finder, to protect against such EM jamming. This will make instant upload impossible, of course, but will enable uninterrupted recording.

Good news everyone!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This should improve the odds that cheapo Chinese drones start to feature more robust IMU/gyro/etc. based fallbacks for dealing with excessive RF noise!

In all seriousness, jamming a drone obviously makes life harder, since it excludes all 'basically just an RC airplane' hardware; prevents the operator from getting footage or issuing new commands, and so on; but it's hardly some rule of the universe that 'just make a docile attempt at landing' is the inevitable response to hitting a nasty RF spike. A variety of options, from heuristics of various sophistication for backing out and trying to escape the jamming; to attempts to fly straight toward where the emissions are most intense and ruin the jammer's day; to just dead-reckoning via onboard sensors and a backup flight path, all exist.

And that doesn't include the drones that actually have some nontrivial machine vision capabilities, or sensors other than cameras that can be used for navigation, though such tend to be rather more expensive.

Re:Good news everyone!

[drinkypoo]

In all seriousness, jamming a drone obviously makes life harder, since it excludes all 'basically just an RC airplane' hardware;

It doesn't. Fixed-wing drones exist, and are literally nothing but a normal plane with the addition of an Arduino (or similar) and a IMU board. I've got one right here. It's simple enough to have the drone fly a pattern or return to home on failsafe. Even Multiwii can land your fixed-wing drone if you've got it programmed correctly, and have a decent altimeter and a sonar on it. I haven't installed the sonar yet, though I have it.

t's hardly some rule of the universe that 'just make a docile attempt at landing' is the inevitable response to hitting a nasty RF spike.

If they are clever they are hijacking the control protocol and giving it slight down on all channels. That should make it spiral slowly to the ground. DSM/DSM2 has been broken wide open and the information made public, and the same attack with minor variations will work on most of the control protocols because they are not well-protected. They jump predictably between a couple of different frequencies. You'd also want to jam GPS. Just nailing it with HERF might or might not do any good; if it has a sensible failsafe it won't down the drone if all it does is interfere with radio communications. And if someone starts using HERF then drones will simply begin to be shielded. It may be nontrivial, but it only has to be figured out once and then everyone else can copy it.

Noise

[markdavis]

But can the jamming rifles be used on boom-box cars? THAT would be nice...

Posting history not strawman

[dbIII]

Posting history not strawman BlueStrat.
Not your first idiotic gun post, not even the twentieth.
I think I'd learned more about gun safety by the time I was seven than the shit you spout.