this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 8 months ago (24 children)

These flying IEDs can be defeated with some simple radio jamming. They will fall out of the sky without a remote control signal.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (21 children)

So, I haven't played with them, but even commercial, off-the-shelf DJI consumer drones have the ability to return to some location if they lose link, so they're gonna have at least GPS in there. You can jam that, but they've got accelerometers, and you can't jam that. They shouldn't drop out of the sky even if you can manage to jam things.

It looks like DJI drones have frequency-hopping spread spectrum support, too. So you have to jam all frequencies that they're using, since you don't know which they're using at any given instant. For consumer hardware, it probably doesn't matter much -- nobody is jamming you, so you sit in your little assigned piece of spectrum, have a handful of channels -- but in a war, you can probably expand the frequencies you use, use a huge chunk of the spectrum, if need be.

There are also some forms of jam resistance that AFAIK are not being exploited -- beam-forming or directional antennas.

Both Russia and Ukraine have a pretty strong interest in using electronic warfare against drones, and the fact that both are still using a lot of them seems like a pretty good argument that they can't currently successfully stop them via electronic warfare.

And even if you can jam signal when it gets really close to the target, if you have a second drone watching -- which it looks like Ukraine and Russia often are, from the videos I see, maybe to do damage assessment -- you can probably stick a laser designator on those, if they haven't already, use it to guide the weaponized drone in.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The accelerometers in consumer grade drones are not nearly accurate enough for inertial navigation over any significant distance. Satellite navigation is often jammed in war. The US military can degrade the accuracy of civilian GPS signals without affecting the encrypted military signals. Frequency hopping can work around some jamming, but a powerful enough jammer will overload and desensitize the receiver making it unable to hear anything.

Optical based navigation would be immune to RF jamming, but that's not going to be found in consumer grade drones.

[–] eleitl@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 months ago

AI visual navigation has already been deployed in russian drones. Not yet in low-end ones.

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