So I can speak to this with a bit of authority seeing as how I accrued approximately 480 combat flight hours on the Shadow 200 UAV in Operation Iraqi Freedom II

So I can speak to this with a bit of authority seeing as how I accrued approximately 480 combat flight hours on the Shadow 200 UAV in Operation Iraqi Freedom II circa 2003-2004. When we were doing our pre-war certification for desert combat, we had a chance to train right next to an anti-aircraft battery. We wanted to know the detectability of the Shadow at mission altitude so we could adjust things to keep from getting shot down. For those that don't know, the Shadow 200 (RQ-7A, now superseded by a bigger model), is built out of a carbon fiber composite with radar absorbing paint. The engine vents exhaust to the top backwards directly into the propellor, which does a wonderful job of breaking up the heat signature. It is approximately 11'x13'. Anyways the shadow is small and was meant to have a very low detectability factor. After the AV is a few thousand feet above the ground, you can either see nor hear it. Our own patriot anti aircraft battery was unable to detect it at mission altitude without setting their gear's sensitivity up night enough to detect large birds, which is totally impractical. So was the Shadow built to be stealth like a B2 or F117? Nope. Is it effectively stealth when flying missions at several thousand feet above the ground? Yup! Go the the Wikipedia page for "Ground Control Station" which has a picture of me in the back of a Shadow GCS sometime around 2001. Now the bigger stuff such as the predator / reaper / global hawk? They have much larger cross signatures, but they are more capable platforms. The shadow only had an approximately 6-7 hour in-air endurance.