I just kinda skimmed through it, so it detects drones in sky? Am I understanding this correctly? That might have some defense application considering what's going on in Eastern Europe right now.
It detects drones which send out RF signals at the same frequency band. Most drones used in Ukraine are tethered with thin optical wire exactly because one of the first anti-drone measures was to simply jam them at the frequencies the operators used.
There are some more advanced anti-drone measures at work: Like blasting them with directed high-energy microwaves to destroy the circuits.
Most drones aren't optical because optical drones sacrifice payload and distance, they're only used when broad spectrum jamming is expected. Jamming of that type is expensive and heavy enough that infantry probably won't be jamming, or light vehicles, or a lot of infrastructure.
Brute force wide band jamming would be easy too and would make hopping ineffective. Unless drones use self tuning antennas to overcome losses, they can't hop too far away from the antenna resonance frequency, which makes jammers job easier.
True, but they can't use directional antennas nor lots of power, and once they're far enough from the transmitter inverse square law does the rest. Ground stations always have an advantage because of higher gain antennas and more power available.
FPV drones in the Russian war are generally pretty dumb devices, there's usually no frequency hopping involved to begin with. They have a lot more in common with baby monitors than with modern military comms.
So what? It's not the airborne platform with limited energy and an explosive payload that needs to do the jamming, it's the ground-based targets.
However, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread a lot of these jamming arguments are academic because drones are either tethered with a fiberoptic cable and/or navigating autonomously.
> That might have some defense application considering what's going on in Eastern Europe right now.
This is a bog-standard phased-array RDF calibrated for WiFi freqs; that stuff is already in every single defense show.
Also, that's why there's jamming everywhere (to blind that kind of things) and why many UAVs are now tethered to optical fibers instead of being RF-controlled.
Why would they put phased arrays on UAVs? They are typically using beam-forming antennas + cheap gimbals for the same purpose.
Phased arrays are nice when you want to scan a large angular surface very fast; when it comes down to optimizing RF radiation toward your ground station, a gimbal is cheaper, simpler, and works fine.
Really depends; there you can see both Lockmart exhibiting multi-billions project, and 150m after some Serbian company selling jet engines for UAVs for a couple hundreds.
I had a friend who'd just gotten out of EE school as a non-traditional student who was working for a company that was making radars for tracking drones maybe five years before the 2022 Russian invasion.
That was an active system, similar in concept to the radars used in air defense system just scaled down and faster acting.
The one in this article is a passive system that sees the transmitter on the drone. The comm link is the obvious weak spot on the drone as it can be detected and jammed, it is fairly inevitable that lethal attack drones that work anonymously will be widespread as a result.
According to CivDiv's channel about 70% of the drones used are still RC FPV drones. They are cheaper longer range and have a slightly simpler supply chain. Fiber optic cable prices have exploded because of the war.
There are some more advanced anti-drone measures at work: Like blasting them with directed high-energy microwaves to destroy the circuits.