[tristanj]

Shahed drones have increased in altitude from ~500m at the beginning of the Ukraine war to 2000-3000m, which is a 4x reduction in noise on the ground. The higher the drones are, the less noise they make at ground level, and the less effective this ground-based microphone system will be. The drones have moved to elevations to make them more difficult to target with ground based weapons. Reductions in ground noise are a secondary effect.

The latest versions of Shahed can reach 5000m in altitude, which would largely be inaudible on the ground.

[dghlsakjg]

At those higher altitudes they are trivial for radar to detect, and from farther away too. They are adapting cheap commodity used marine radars to get this done in some places

I suspect the Shaheds are going higher to mitigate AA ground fire. Higher up you have to send a missile or interceptor up.

It’s a trade off.

[rdtsc]

And interceptors are more expensive than Shaheds. A $100k interceptor (guessing here) to shoot a $10k Shahed can be an acceptable deal for the side launching the Shaheds.

[dghlsakjg]

Interceptor in this case refers to reusable aircraft. They are sending up cheap to operate prop planes to intercept Shaheds in Ukraine now.

Sending up a plane that costs $500/hour to operate to take down a few Shaheds an hour works out really well.

YouTube has plenty of videos of these guys going up and just shooting them out of the air.

[anovikov]

It's not about "can reach", it's fairly easy to get them to fly even higher. It's about danger of interceptors vs danger of detection. Today's Ukrainian detection network (based on radars) is so dense there is no way to hide from it anywhere, anyway, so high altitude wins.

[Hackbraten]

> It's about danger of interceptors vs danger of detection.

What's with that "vs" trade-off?

You're saying avoiding detection requires high altitudes.

What do interceptors have to do with that?

[anovikov]

Interceptors are battery powered and their energy budget and thus range suffers if they have to climb high.

Detection is facilitated by radar, low altitude means flying under the radar (due to curvature of the Earth) - except radar network is now so dense, it in practice can't work anymore. So they can fly low or high they will be detected anyway - but flying high reduces interceptor's reach and makes intercept geometry harder, giving them better chances to slip through.

[warumdarum]

So film the sky during charging and run a llm on it?

[dghlsakjg]

Clouds and nighttime are a barrier to visual detection. Even with good effectiveness the conditions needed for that would mean that you have far less than 50% uptime, and your downtime is predictable to your adversary.

A cheap radar takes an order of magnitude less power to run on hardware that is cheaper than an LLM and can see way farther than a camera.

[Neywiny]

Or an image detection model. Fraction of the compute and can run even on edge embedded. And easy to train with your own data