
Idiots with drones have shut down the UK’s second largest airport - x43b
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18149819/london-gatwick-airport-drone-shutdown-reports
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justtopost
They have created hundreds of millions in damage with a few thousand in
drones, and have yet to be caught. While you may be angry with them, the facts
hardly paint the suspects as 'idiots' just yet. Embarassing a first world
nations military ability to find and disable a drone and its operator with a
remote control heli is almost halarious if it wasn't indicitive of a gastly
level of incompetince in drone warfare. Its hardly new.

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xupybd
Shouldn’t it be possible to track the radio control back to the source?

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Piskvorrr
If there _is_ one.

10 WAIT 3600

20 FLY UP +200

30 FLY WEST +1000

40 FLY NORTH +1000

50 FLY WEST -1000

60 FLY NORTH -1000

70 GOTO 30

In other words, set your drone on the ground, drive off, and have it follow a
preprogrammed route until batteries die. Never any radio traffic.

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herogreen
It practice you would have a GPS on board and give absolute waypoints to take
wind into account. So maybe GPS jammer in this case ? Not very practical.

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Piskvorrr
It would be imprecise, but if you only need to sow chaos, you don't care where
precisely the drone goes. Plus you've dragged in a host of external
dependencies, all hungry and some of them networked: GPS and left_pad and
bcmath, oh my!

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b_tterc_p
So what’s the best way to take these things out if we’re not comfortable
firing bullets (reasonable). I would think other drones casting wide nets
might work?

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theoh
I'm guessing the problem is that making the drone fall out of the sky is not
safe either, in the general case. So either a bird that will grab a drone and
return to the handler, or some kind of way of scooping up the drone in a net
held by multiple drones seem like the best options. It's an asymmetric
situation.

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toufiqbarhamov
The story of weapons vs. countermeasures is for the most part, a history of
just such assymmetries in favor of weapons. With few exceptions, weapons are
generations ahead of countermeasures. It is still much much easier to shoot
someone than to defend against being shot. It’s easier to drop nuclear
warheads than intercept them, to lay mines than sweep for them, and so on.

I think it’s just the usual wages of entropy, in the same way that it’s easier
to spread falsehoods than recitfy them.

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fons
I recall some airport was using trained hawks to hunt down drones. I wonder
what happened with that approach.

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ljf
Since this is a '£5k' drone, I wonder if it is too big for the hawks?

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astannard
I was thinking a kind of chaff, long wires coated in a thin film of plastic to
slow their decent, fire a load of these into the air around the drone and it
will come down by tieing up its propellers. I also considered rubber bullets
would work too.

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DBYCZ
I wonder if an air vortex cannon could be built powerful enough to take one of
these down

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thisgoodlife
I thought by now all airports should have some kind of anti drone weapon to
handle cases like this.

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rkagerer
Something like DroneShield? Anyone know whether those things are effective or
just a gimmick?

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Piskvorrr
Active radar? GPS+comm radio jammer? If that works as promised, not something
you would like to deploy at an airport.

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chewz
Drone disabling Kalashinikv gun

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mlfHzg-p38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mlfHzg-p38)

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Piskvorrr
Yeah. A jammer. Seems to work great for tens of meters...how does it cope with
inverse square law, I wonder?

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rkagerer
Polly wanna drone?
[https://youtu.be/kAYVyj6vf3Y](https://youtu.be/kAYVyj6vf3Y)

