Consumer drone gear is very easy to jam, also easier to foxhunt (RF location hunting) so it works both ways.
And the drone is too small to be intercepted with missile.
FPV drone costs 500-1000$ now and is the game changer in the current war. No ground offensive operation can be maid now without great loses.
Alternatively, send gps guided drones with optical targeting. If the jamming system has inadequate air defenses, it might not be jamming for long.
That being said I wonder if you could control small drones over satellite or if that is a $900 solution to a 99 cent problem.
The more promising areas are optical communications (but this has issues with fog and atmospheric attenuation), or directional antennas. Like, a yagi on a gimbal constantly pointed at the control station.
That's an arms race with exactly one step.
If you're using a commercial system, then you're using FHSS across the whole of the 2.4GHz ISM band for your control link and most of the 5.8GHz band for digital VTX. If you're designing a system for military applications, then either you use SDR to go frequency agile across everything from VHF to the S or C band, or you're in the wrong job. The Nash equilibrium is for everyone to use all practical frequencies all of the time and the technology to do that is largely mature.
>Directional antennas can emit RF in the direction of the enemy, but not your own assets.
How directional? If it's very directional, then you've got a drone gun, which relies on you being able to see and track incoming drones. If you can see and track, you've already solved the hard part and making a hard kill is comparatively easy. If it isn't especially directional, then you've created a conical area of denial that is only marginally more problematic for your enemy than for yourself and still fairly easy to triangulate.
There is maybe a viable strategy of coordinating the frequency hopping of your jammers and your drones and using a distributed network of low-cost jamming transmitters to avoid painting a target on your own back, but it's well beyond the technological capabilities or the budget of either Russia or Ukraine. I have no doubt that DARPA are working on something along those lines, but the base rate probability of a DARPA project actually getting to the battlefield is fairly low.
For my money, the near-future of counter-drone technology is kinetic. The Flakpanzer Gepard was considered obsolete a decade ago, but it's arguably the most valuable asset in the Ukrainian arsenal for dealing with drone threats. Most current hard-kill active protection systems should be fairly straightforward to upgrade to reliably deal with loitering munitions.
And yeah, the most effective way of avoiding EF friendly fire is spread spectrum communication where the jammer is synchronized to avoid the frequencies being used for communications. But that can be tricky to set up, since you have potentially many different radio systems with their own spread spectrum scheme.
1. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/antenna_theory/images/uni_dir...
This is both a fantastic line and wisdom.
China is also selling the same stuff to Russia. Some local manufacturing is being attempted (for instance I have seen a Ukrainian made ESC board and Russian steel frames) but China pricing and quality is really difficult to compete against.
Russia is beginning to ramp up drone production in real factories and I suspect they will eventually out-produce Ukraine, who is easily building 10K/month right now.
Beyond true. I'm in a telegram of the Ukraine war and there is so much drone footage of them literally dropping bombs on the heads of Russians, it is insane. All of this caught on 4k video.
There is one video of a guy sitting in the dirt... he's pointing at the drone to show where his friend is... drone bombs the friend, right on the head... and then comes back and bombs him. I'd link it here, but I think it is just too extreme for this site.
However, FPV drones are the cheapest GUIDED weapon by far. It's finally cost effective to give every single soldier a "Fuck that guy in particular" weapon.
They will be significantly less effective in a real, peer conflict between great powers though. China or the US would likely have significant EW capabilities against drones. The US would probably rather turn off GPS entirely than deal with American soldiers being donked on the head with personalized grenades every day.
So drones in a conflict like that would be much less useful in "hot" locations, or will be significantly more expensive per unit so they can be made harder to jam and interfere with, or will be used more as a nuisance.
But GPS is just one thing in the navigation toolbox. There are so many other ways for drones to orient themselves, from triangulating on RF signals to object recognition and location with ML, and both of these are now commodity technologies. And capabilities (and thus options) go up considerably once you start mixing and matching systems rather than leaning heavily into a single design.
When I say commodity technologies, I mean this stuff is so cheap and accessible now that I can see belligerents launching drone swarms simply to get the countermeasure batteries to reveal themselves. To an extent this is already happening in Ukraine; Russian ECM is superior to anything fielded by the Ukrainians (and allegedly, to anything the west has), but Ukrainians are in turn selectively targeting Russian ECM trucks.
Would that help, considering that GLONASS, or Galileo, or BeiDou or could be used instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
You are correct that most (all?) the “GPS” modules used for drones would fallback to one or more of the above alternatives to GPS.
I just saw Ukraine drone-dropping Russian landmines back onto Russians. Fields full of free munitions.
They are already tracking down signal sources and targeting them. The drones fly around till they get a signal maximum then look down.
I have also seen enemy analog video snooping where they watch the drone take-off point and geo-locate it to bomb.
>harder to jam and interfere with
This is where I have my doubts... We have things like HARM missiles, and I think we probably already have are or are developing "HARD" High-Speed Anti-Radiation Drones, that loiter around then attack whatever decides to start making noise in particular areas.
Drones have been in use long before Russia took any land from Ukraine in 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_warfare#Notable_drone_st...
However, a war like the one in Ukraine will accelerate the development and usage of drones. You could tell by the early usage in the first few months of the war.
Now more global defense dollars will go into the rapid development.
Wait until we see swarms of (semi)autonomous drones
Slaughterbots[ß] becoming reality in 3...2...1...
Ukraine is very worried that China is trying to cut them off, so they buy through a long chain of intermediaries.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of a certain brand of drones is dedicated to this purpose, and what those supply lines look like, because most of the videos I see have only but a small handful of models in use.