3 ms·

if it can spot/track drones that is a marketing opportunity for airports around the world that have to deal with drone nonsense which shut down flights for days

• pixelesque 3mo ago
  If would likely need to track them well (not sure from this article/video if that's the case?) to be useful in that scenario... Drawing a splodge in roughly the location (not sure if there's range info either? I doubt it if it's passive) overlaid on the video likely won't cut it...
• bri3d 3mo ago
  Most major airports will already have a counter-UAS system, it's a huge industry. One big issue with radar is that it has the same problem pilots and human observers do: it struggles to distinguish drones from anything else in the sky (birds, balloons, planes, etc.). This is an active and improving research space, but by and large with radar, when your pilots report a drone, you still don't know how to figure out if it's the typical mis-identification or something real.
  • ck2 3mo ago
    I'm reading about pilots spotting drones during takeoff/landing that the airport didn't know about And I've read about airport shutdowns in UK and US without a single arrest which is why it keeps happening So whatever system exists, apparently not good enough
    • bri3d 3mo ago
      Right, there are two problems there: * Pilots are very concerned about life and safety and are heavily exposed to drone “incident” related anecdotes, so they err far on the side of caution with drone sightings. Which is to say a very low percentage of them are real. * Poorly implemented cUAS systems, especially ones based on passive or active RF locating (radar) can actually make the problem worse: they hallucinate everything into drones, pilots hallucinate everything into drones, and now everything is a drone. This also happens frequently when people try to repurpose military systems (which are usually designed to operate in significantly less crowded environments and trigger at the slightest hint of an issue, due to mostly orthogonal-to-airports threat models people discuss at length on this thread like “dark drones”) into urban use. This type of array based directionfinding system is cool and it could work as a small ingredient in a drone detection system, but it’s not anywhere near the state of the art in the space and most airports are probably already ahead of this to some extent.
• tamimio 3mo ago
  There are more way advanced systems for cuas, where they infuse radar and visual and acoustic plus now AI to minimize the false positives, but practically speaking, they are not bullet proof and still fail. RID (remote ID) is a way to have a cooperative communication and was mandated in US, but there are ways too to spoof it and cloak it.
  • somehnguy 3mo ago
    Yeah RemoteID is trivial to spoof using an ESP32. Most hobby pilots I know simply don't comply with RemoteID. And bad actors certainly won't purchase a $75 device to add to their drone. It does become a bit more difficult with consumer grade off the shelf drones because it's built in. Still defeatable by the determined of course.
• nradov 3mo ago
  Yes, primary radar has been useful for detecting airspace incursions since 1939. Nothing new here.
  • knorker 3mo ago
    The difference with this kind of tech, though, is tracking down the operator.
• ThrowawayR2 3mo ago
  Phased array antennas (in use since the 1960s) and AESA (in use since the 1990s) are very mature tech that RF engineers are well aware of. This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.
• btbuildem 3mo ago
  Only the ones that use radio for control. The fiberoptic ones are "dark" to this setup.