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A comment on The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico balloon over Canada. Parent comment

Re:The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico... by carabiner on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @11:48PM (#34815165)
You can't drive into Area 51. Spy balloons can loiter and be hard to detect due to a low radar cross section, unlike satellites which fly over on set schedules. Consumer drones cannot fly high, are easy to detect, and have very limited endurance.
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Re:The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico... by jykim256 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @12:06AM (#34815283)
Spy balloons like the one we shot down have incredibly large radar cross sections; they just get deleted by radar algorithms because they move so slowly.
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Re:The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico... by mumumu on Thursday February 16, 2023 @12:33AM (#34815444)
They have smaller cross section than many stealth jets:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/why-shooting-down-chin...

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Re:The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico... by mrexroad on Thursday February 16, 2023 @03:15PM (#34825247)
From the article, a good explanation for why recent incidents used missiles rather than the cannons (among other reasons):

“In 1998, a rogue weather balloon from Canada deployed to measure ozone levels accidentally drifted away. BBC reported at the time that the airship was the size of a 25-story building and was operating at an altitude between 27,000 and 37,000 feet, so admittedly much lower than China’s balloon is now. The incursion prompted attempts from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States to shoot it down, with two Canadian Air Force CF-18 Hornet fighters firing more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from their own Vulcan cannons into the balloon off the coast of Newfoundland. That balloon took days to come down, at one point even gaining altitude and drifting across Canada and then out over the Atlantic Ocean, which made for a problematic situation for regional air traffic.”

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Re:The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico... by xp84 on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @01:41PM (#34884969)
Genuine question: Were any of these balloons floating over something restricted like that?

The point I should have said was "Were any of these flying over a restricted area that couldn't have been easily checked out by a drone? If not this seems like an unlikely spy mission, or at best a poorly-planned one."

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