If I understand correctly, a jammer puts out a bunch of RF to overload a drone’s remote link or GPS signal. Why wouldn’t it be trivially easy to just home in on that transmitter and destroy it?
In: Engineering
OP, you’ve got a great question there.
The problem is relative signal strength. The drone creates a ton of noise by running 4x ESCs and brushless motors. It may broadcast on 400mhz ,900mhz, 1.2, 1.5, 2.4, 5.8 ghz. God only knows what other bands are running up there right now.
The signals on the bird will interfere with its ability to home in on another signal at range, even if it’s a very strong signal. Remember that received power is the inverse of the square of distance. When distance is zero, the signal is very strong, even if it really isn’t strong in absolute power.
To combat that, you’ve got to get the RF transmitters off the bird and quiet it down a bit. That means 1 ESC not 4, or better a nitro engine that runs like a diesel, not electric or magneto powered. No video transmitter. No RC input. Shielding on the GPS system. Shielding on the computers. Then, because you have a fixed wing, you can incorporate antennas into the wings for receive.
The original shrike seeker could probably fit on a 10 inch quad if you could power it. The questions then become – is your bird fast enough to make a difference? Can it carry enough bang to make a difference? Is it better to power that whole package with a rocket, than a propeller?
An anti radiation drone is intriguing. But I think fitting it to existing guided surface to surface rockets would be more effective in the short term. The thing that gives drones their power isn’t their flying capabilities or speed. It’s the fact that there is a human flying and interpreting data from the drone. Best guidance system there is…
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