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A comment on DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrupting Flights. Parent comment

Re:DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrup... by cyberferret on Thursday April 27, 2017 @01:38AM (#14209420)
I don't know - the idea of someone who has done a week's "security training" running around all that expensive, critical ground and airborne communications & navigation equipment with a weapon capable of blasting out EMP signals makes me more than a little nervous...

No matter how expensive the "gun" is, you cannot really direct an EMP wave and restrict it like a traditional borescope weapon. All it will take is for someone firing it across an ILS transmitter array at a drone on the other side, and the airport loses their Cat II landing capability just as the airport gets socked in.

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Re:DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrup... by akira2501 on Thursday April 27, 2017 @03:51AM (#14209900)
Using a phased array you can "lens" a signal fairly effectively. Aside from this, you could use multiple transmitters that are fairly low power on their own, but in a combined and targeted shot could deliver a knockout blow to a drone.
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Re:DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrup... by benh14 on Thursday April 27, 2017 @06:11AM (#14210393)
from what I've heard, the 'guns' are just signal jammers
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Re:DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrup... by tomswartz07 on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:54AM (#14211050)
The problem being that in order to effectively 'jam' a signal far away, antenna theory requires that a fairly significant proportion of that radio energy must be directed out the back of the 'antenna'/gun. Right into the person firing it.

That's also ignoring the fact that if the signal to a drone is lost, it's more than likely to fall out of the sky like a ton of bricks.

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Re:DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrup... by mnarayan01 on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:19AM (#14211215)
> That's also ignoring the fact that if the signal to a drone is lost, it's more than likely to fall out of the sky like a ton of bricks.

Consumer drones typically have well-defined and behaved signal loss behavior, which (for DJI ones at least) is even fairly configurable. Though quite often that behavior involves gaining a substantial amount of altitude (at least by default), which at an airport is actually probably worse than dropping.

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Re:DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrup... by sp332 on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:44AM (#14211379)
I don't see why the signal has to go out the back. Otherwise dish-type antennas couldn't work. And those TV aerials would work as well pointed 180 degrees away from a signal as straight at it, which isn't true.
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Re:DJI Puts $145K Bounty on the Drone Pilots Who Were Disrup... by tomswartz07 on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @09:52AM (#14246286)
It's based on the antenna design. These 'jammer' devices aren't dish based; they're designed after Yagi-Uda style antennas, in the format of a 'rifle' that the user points at the drone. The radiation pattern for them is exactly as I described. [1]

[1] https://www.electronics-notes.com/images/antenna-yagi-radiat...

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