[3amOpsGuy]

Begs the question though, what exactly are they doing during R&D?

About 2 years ago i was building comparable devices for around £285 GBP each. Today i can do the same (thanks to cheaper lighter parts and experience on my part) for slightly over £110, that could be reduced for bulk builds.

My R&D costs were 2 weeks worth of my evenings reading and planning.

You can buy a commercially developed equivalent with better flight stability than the model they've produced (their design is inherently more unstable - and thus agile, and possibly slightly quieter) for under £60 delivered, video reception equipment is a separate purchase at £30.

[gallamine]

You should consider that most (all?) of the tiny RC equipment comes straight out of China. Given that, I suspect that they had to build the thing from the ground-up. Did you do everything from choosing materials to designing your own gearbox?

[rubyrescue]

except that theirs probably (hopefully) is not (easily) jammable and the signal is not (hopefully/easily) interceptable...

[3amOpsGuy]

Hopefully!

Although i reckon even the common kit that's been available to consumers for the past few years could be tricky to jam without concerted effort:

http://www.futaba-rc.com/technology/fasst.html

I.e. to jam this frequency hopping requires than you either a) figure out what channels to jam at what time or b) saturate the full bandwidth.

If you can do either of those, you'd probably be better jamming the voice comms than RC helis. Not sure though.

[rdl]

The frequency hop rate for commercial stuff is pretty low.

[dbaupp]

Presumably the military has met (and solved) this problem already, so it's just a case of getting the RF equipment small enough.