Comment by lazide
4 months ago
Even basic consumer drones use frequency hopping and have relatively complex signal integrity logic - necessary even for using ‘free’ frequencies like 2.4 and 5.4 ghz in typical urban environments. And they’re pretty good, frankly.
"Frequency hopping" does nothing when your adversary can blow out the entire 2.4 and 5.4GHz bands, even before getting into sophisticated radio-specific attacks.
Urban radio environments are crowded, not actively hostile.
And yet, plenty of field success right now with consumer (even basic amateur level) drones.
The issue with high energy jamming (broad frequency band denial) is it makes your jammer a super tempting (and easy) target for a HARM or equivalent, and consumes quite a bit of power. If someone is actively denying such a wide frequency band, any high school level electronics student can design a pretty effective seeker.
And the whole 'radio power drops off as a cube of the distance' thing means the equipment needs to be pretty close to operations, so it's going to get attacked pretty often.
The noise level in a typical urban environment from wifi is already pretty terrible, 'hostile' or not. Way more terrible than a typical remote environment, which is where these drones are being used, unless there are active countermeasures pretty close.
Counter measures, counter-counter measures, etc. But I'm not seeing much mention of effective jamming happening in-theatre right now.