Why would they use this over the much cheaper mavic?
On average the commercial drones in Ukraine survive 3 missions. I doubt anyone would spend the price of 5 mavic drones just to have more pixels at a trench.
I mean those guys are drone nerds too. Maybe it won't be a ton of footage coming out of there but there will be some of those guys using these. Besides that, I used to fly aerial mapping missions over afghanistan and the same reason we needed high res images super fast (as opposed to tasking satellites) for a low level op coming in a few days to see ingress points, chokepoints, hlz sites fresh, etc. They definitely have a role there but not the every day sort of recce the grunts are using them for.
I wonder if there's any information out of Ukraine about how effective shotguns loaded with birdshot are against drones. Probably not data you're ever going to get anywhere else.
Birdshot is very effective against plastic propellers and soft side lipo batteries, which are both virtually universal critical components on FPV quadcopters.
3 flights actually seems pretty good given the conditions-- I suspect they aren't walking out to fetch any crashed or malfunctioning devices in an active combat zone and the analog video signals are exceptionally easy to interfere with.
Sure, but how does the effective range of birdshot compare to useful flight altitudes? How difficult is compensating for drift and elevation? What's the ideal shot size and choke for killing drones? If someone with the best anti-drone load out sees a drone, how long and how many rounds does it take on average to down one?
"The best anti-drone load out" in the context of FPV quadcopters is going to be a radio transmitter configured to overwhelm their video or hijack control through frequency hopping attacks. The marginal cost of taking down the drone is virtually zero, radio jamming provides a continuous wide area of denial without user input and can't be overwhelmed by a swarm of attacking drones like a point defense turret could be.
The RC control channel is unencrypted and the video feed is analog. If I'm being attacked by FPV drones I'll take a freshly certified ham radio operator over a world champion duck hunter any day.
While I'm sure there are some DJIs being used for recon, my understanding of the situation is that the overwhelming majority of drones used as guidance / delivery systems for munitions are hobbyist style DIY fpv drones. They are less expensive, have significantly higher payload carry capability and can be constructed from more generally available and interchangeable components[1][2][3]
For these types of drones all the consumer and FOSS control links are unencrypted and critically vulnerable to frequency hopping hijacking attacks [4]
The video and control for all of these systems (including DJI) can be disrupted by jamming consumer and hobbyist frequencies; 300-975mhz, 2.4ghz, and 5.8ghz.
As with any information coming from active modern war zones, the incidence of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda will be high.
Electronic warfare would probably have a mode to allow a drone to go inside its “kill range” then activate the hammer to down the drone. Likely could do an off for 5 min on for 20 seconds or just enough
Source? If you are talking averaging suicide drones that have 1 mission and other types, then maybe... But all those drones that we see on YouTube dropping granades, it will be quite shocking to have them shot down so quickly.
On average the commercial drones in Ukraine survive 3 missions. I doubt anyone would spend the price of 5 mavic drones just to have more pixels at a trench.