Military drone swarms and how to combat them

Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by RF_Savage on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @01:13AM (#32560691)

Extremely vulnerable to jamming and other electrical warfare and thus not usable at the frontlines.

Ome can find out from public sources that Switchblades run their video and control 900MHz + 2.4GHz bands. Which makes sense for a disposable product and likely worked fine in Afganistan. But against an adversary with jammers and other EW it will fare much worse. Still usable in the rear, as we have seen.

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by ge96 on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @01:24AM (#32560757)

Wonder if you could do point to point laser comms.

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by kragen on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @01:43AM (#32560848)

US military radios use FHSS spanning 225-420 MHz. I don't know details but I bet they're hard to jam or even detect.

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by bob1029 on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @02:21PM (#32568963)

DSSS/FHSS schemes are almost magical in LPI and resilience when applied aggressively in a military setting.

Operating below the noise floor shouldn't be possible at first glance, but through the power of statistics it absolutely is feasible.

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by kragen on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @12:40AM (#32575075)

Hmm, I notice you mention LPI and resilience but not LPD (low probability of detection). Is DSSS maybe easier than FHSS for an adversary to detect on a waterfall plot and localize with phase correlation if they have a phased array? Or is it also suitable for LPD?

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by RF_Savage on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @10:47AM (#32580154)

Or 36-87MHz. And plenty of others.

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by sleepybrett on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @03:07PM (#32569727)

nothing stopping them from running different radio infrastructure

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by RF_Savage on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @10:45AM (#32580137)

The hardware is stopping then.

Can't exactly re-engineer all the RF parts in the drone and the groundstation.

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Re:Military drone swarms and how to combat them by sleepybrett on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:07PM (#32584242)

you probably actually can. On the hobbiest side I swapped out my 2.4ghz control radio w/ 900mhz in about 10 minutes, honestly the hardest part was zip tieing it in place. In most drones the actual radios are discrete components even many of the very tiny 'tiny woop' style drones. Snap the transmitter side into my rc controller's module slot, rebind and I'm back flying.

Now I'm not sure how a switchblade goes together, but I imagine it's even easier a field expedient way to swap frequencies seems pretty useful in a situation where jammers are in play.

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