China's Police Will Shoot Illegal Drones With Radio-Jamming Rifles (mashable.com) 62
"Police in China are being equipped with new high-tech weaponry to help them fight back against illegal drone use," writes new submitter drunkdrone. Mashable reports:
A Chinese city's police department is arming itself with more than 20 drone-jamming rifles...which work by emitting radio signals that force the drones to land, purportedly without damaging them. The drone-killing rifles will be used during the upcoming 2017 Wuhan Marathon, to raise security. Wuhan police demonstrated the drone-killing rifles last week, where they shot down six drones, according to the Chutian Metropolitan Daily.
Each rifle costs $36,265, and has a range of 0.6 miles.
Each rifle costs $36,265, and has a range of 0.6 miles.
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he dead
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Ah but a ciws with a couple of these baby's and some modified programming could be awesome
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A continuation of that thought these jam radio could it block GPS too? They might be useful in real ciws systems as a second shootdown or at least turn off course.
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A drone built right down to budget and weight might not have anything to fall back on; but compasses, terrain-following, inertial navigation, even celestial navigation if it isn't too sunny are all options.
Inertial navigation should be enough. The problem then is processing time. A drone with an Arduino or even a stm32 is spending most of its time running the flight control code.
Re: Not if the NRA has any balls! (Score:1)
don't worry, Alibaba will have them for sale (Score:2)
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radio control always land safely and without damage.
where "safely" means "unable to transmit footage of potentially horrific things that make government look bad".
and "without damage" means "more evidence to gather to aid in rounding up the pilot".
Look at it this way: "safely" does not mean properly shielded so the police operator doesn't have a gigantically increased chance of getting brain cancer.
Easy to defeat... (Score:2)
Each rifle costs $36,265, and has a range of 0.6 miles.
Bold mine.
Here's how:
Incorporate software in the drones to keep them at 0.7miles and above, while still doing what they need to do.
How about that?
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The killer drones could be pre-programmed to attack a given target, with some on-board flight adjustment options, and radio contact is unnecessary to guide them.
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Incorporate software in the drones to keep them at 0.7miles and above, while still doing what they need to do.
To put this in perspective, that's just over 1km high, which is over twice the height of the Empire State Building, and comfortably above the 830m height of the world's current tallest building, the Burj Kalifa.
Even if you've got a drone that has that sort of range- which is going to be at the upper limit or beyond most consumer drones at present anyway- you're not going to get close enough to view anything of note in worthwhile detail in the vast majority of situations.
Regular rifles do this too (Score:1)
Regular rifles can permanently jam a radio signal to a drone too... If you hit it right... (in the receiver...)
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You're idea is also a lot cheaper! $1500 for a GOOD rifle. And a buck or 2 for the round to disable the drone for re-purposing(sell on ebay to get some of the investment back)
Drone killing? (Score:1)
...which work by emitting radio signals that force the drones to land, purportedly without damaging them. The drone-killing rifles
This doesn't sound like what most people would consider "drone killing". But I guess that makes a better headline than drone disabling.
Eagles... (Score:1)
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Apparently tigers work better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Funny, I liked the "ill-eagle drones" :D
Reminds me at a /. post a few weeks ago where a mining company was complaining about eagles killing their $10k camera drones. They even where so stupid to "camouflage" their drones as eagles ... facepalm.
Sounds expensive. (Score:3)
China's Police Will Shoot Illegal Drones With Radio-Jamming Rifles
Wouldn't it be cheaper to shoot the drones using radio-jamming rifles?
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So focused ionising radiation, so drone rifles or cancer guns. I hear the CIA had the idea first, not to shoot down drones, though.
Useful. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can use them to jam radios and cameras in protester crowds too, to make sure those embarrassing videos don't reach the internet.
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You can use them to jam radios and cameras in protester crowds too, to make sure those embarrassing videos don't reach the internet instantaneously.
FTFY
As long as there is local storage of video, you will never be able to suppress embarrassing videos.
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Good point, but the Chinese are actually rather resourceful and will surely realise that they can cover their camera or phone in aluminium foil with apertures for the objective and the focus finder, to protect against such EM jamming. This will make instant upload impossible, of course, but will enable uninterrupted recording.
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How do you remote control a drone that is covered in aluminium foil?
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Good news everyone! (Score:4, Interesting)
In all seriousness, jamming a drone obviously makes life harder, since it excludes all 'basically just an RC airplane' hardware; prevents the operator from getting footage or issuing new commands, and so on; but it's hardly some rule of the universe that 'just make a docile attempt at landing' is the inevitable response to hitting a nasty RF spike. A variety of options, from heuristics of various sophistication for backing out and trying to escape the jamming; to attempts to fly straight toward where the emissions are most intense and ruin the jammer's day; to just dead-reckoning via onboard sensors and a backup flight path, all exist.
And that doesn't include the drones that actually have some nontrivial machine vision capabilities, or sensors other than cameras that can be used for navigation, though such tend to be rather more expensive.
Re:Good news everyone! (Score:4, Interesting)
In all seriousness, jamming a drone obviously makes life harder, since it excludes all 'basically just an RC airplane' hardware;
It doesn't. Fixed-wing drones exist, and are literally nothing but a normal plane with the addition of an Arduino (or similar) and a IMU board. I've got one right here. It's simple enough to have the drone fly a pattern or return to home on failsafe. Even Multiwii can land your fixed-wing drone if you've got it programmed correctly, and have a decent altimeter and a sonar on it. I haven't installed the sonar yet, though I have it.
t's hardly some rule of the universe that 'just make a docile attempt at landing' is the inevitable response to hitting a nasty RF spike.
If they are clever they are hijacking the control protocol and giving it slight down on all channels. That should make it spiral slowly to the ground. DSM/DSM2 has been broken wide open and the information made public, and the same attack with minor variations will work on most of the control protocols because they are not well-protected. They jump predictably between a couple of different frequencies. You'd also want to jam GPS. Just nailing it with HERF might or might not do any good; if it has a sensible failsafe it won't down the drone if all it does is interfere with radio communications. And if someone starts using HERF then drones will simply begin to be shielded. It may be nontrivial, but it only has to be figured out once and then everyone else can copy it.
They are just protecting themselves (Score:1)
The Chinese already have human overlords, they don't need robotic ones [slashdot.org].
Noise (Score:3)
But can the jamming rifles be used on boom-box cars? THAT would be nice...
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But can the jamming rifles be used on boom-box cars?
A regular rifle is good enough for that. If the car is loud enough, no one will hear the shots.
Will it force "Return to Launch" ?? (Score:1)
I'm interested in knowing what the rifles actually do.
If it's jamming the control frequency, then the drone may simply report loss of controller communication and automatically return to where it's home position was recorded.
OTOH, if it causes the drone to fall out of the sky, then the drone could cause other unforeseen problems.
Either way an RF emitting rifle is much more cost effective than a patriot missile.
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More effective and cheaper!
Only within the limited effective altitude range of the shotgun. Effective horizontal range of a 12GA is around 200 yards maximum. Vertical (or near-vertical) range would be much less. A drone at 700 feet altitude should be safe from most regular shotguns, I would think. A large-bore goose gun could do better, but they still have limitations. Shotgun pellets lose velocity quickly when fired in the normal near-horizontal plane, fighting gravity on top of that...well...better hope the drone is trying for a re
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The way to spot a gun nut is that they know fuckall about guns, even less about gun safety and accept that traitor Oliver North in the NRA as their leader.
Not every gun user is a gun nut. Maybe consider becoming one of those instead of the foaming at the mouth political types.
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Firing shotguns into the air in cities - what could possibly go wrong?
Such a marvelous strawman! And, you built it all by yourself with nothing at all in the OP's post nor my own discussing appropriate-use scenarios on which to base your assumptions! Bravo! [golf clap]
The way to spot a gun nut...
In your world they must be jumping out from behind every rock and tree. What color is the sky there? Is hoplophobia as common there as you make it appear?
Maybe consider becoming one of those instead of the foaming at the mouth political types.
Hooboy! You can cut the irony here with a knife! That is, if a knife doesn't also trigger one of your various phobias/fixations/fetishes as well!
You are a sill
Posting history not strawman (Score:3)
Not your first idiotic gun post, not even the twentieth.
I think I'd learned more about gun safety by the time I was seven than the shit you spout.
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Not to insert check his posting history, world class loser.
Inferior communist technology (Score:1)
For just 80 times the cost, A US Ally Shot Down a $200 Drone With a $3 Million Patriot Missile [slashdot.org], superior US military technology can shoot it down at up to 160 times the distance! Wikipedia: MIM-104 Patriot [wikipedia.org].
Superior Patriot technology let you protect against drones in a 80 524 times as large area at a cost effectiveness at 100:1 considering the low extra cost at 80x the price of this anti-drone rifle!
Not all that effective (Score:2)