There have been claims in Ukraine/Russia that drone operators (emphasis on operators) get located via radio signal and hit with arty / HARMs.
How true is this? Is it really possible to detect drone control radio output on a consistent basis across the whole frontline?
I understand that if they get 10 EW drones in the air in a one kilometer area, they will find your wifi, but how does this work "in practice"?
it works the same way brits located uboats in ww2
it's very easy
And germans locating french resistance radios operated in cities 70 years ago in ww2. All you need is two radio direction finders and take bearings on the direction from each, then work out on a map where the two directions cross to find a broadcaster. The only real defence is to stay mobile.
>The only real defence is to stay mobile.
Pretty much this.
This video provides some insight on how Ukrainian operators avoid getting fucked: https://youtu.be/RAR8f7SPYrE
In the case of DJI drones, DJI literally manufactures systems to remotely detect and shut down their drones which they sell to LEO organisations.
>DJI literally manufactures systems to remotely detect and shut down their drones which they sell to LEO organisations.
proofs
>-t. lazy nagger
Aeroscope.
https://www.theverge.com/22985101/dji-aeroscope-ukraine-russia-drone-tracking
>How true is this?
It is.
>Is it really possible to detect drone control radio output on a consistent basis across the whole frontline?
Yes, there are EW devices for that, but they cover only a narrow portion of the frontlines, and it's not enough of the equipment to be a wide-spread threat.
Read more about specifics here:
https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/noveyshie-sredstva-radioelektronnoy-borby-vs-rossiyskoy-federatsii-primenyaemye-v-hode-spetsialnoy-operatsii-na-ukraine/viewer
Not an exact mechanism, but both Ukrainians and Russians learned to get rid of this limitation within the first months of the war.
Blyat, ya che hohol/kazap whitepaper na russkom chitat? Shuchu, spasibo.
See:
It's literally built into DJI drones to emit a signature and take a shut down signal.
Aren't most common cables rated for like 30meters max? And that's if you get fancy shit.
Just say triangulation. Most of us have a first grade education, probably.
>Most of us have a first grade education, probably.
> "Most of us"
> "probably"
I'll agree that you are probably correct. However, I have no faith that it's a certainty. I've been around this shitheap long enough to spot things that shouldn't surprise me, and PrepHole rarely lets me down.
>there are EW devices for that
That picture.
Obviously a passive system is generally pretty safe but I remember reading about a system for locating a receiver, British MI5 were using it to locate a spy ring.
I think it might have been in the book Spycatcher but it could have been somewhere else.
Do you know anything about what I'm talking about?
> locating a receiver,
Only works with "primitive" receivers without antenna isolation (Super/heterodyne, super/regenerative). Some receivers aren't "passive" like a diode detector.
It's been years since I read it and my radio physics isn't stellar but I had some idea it involved generating a field over an area and looking for power loss in it. Only receivers tuned to that frequency are going to subtract energy from the transmission or something like that.
That sounds like a remote "metal detector" (of course with a different principle).
> subtract energy from the transmission
It's really hard to detect a "darker spot" with such a low resolution of anything below many-GHz.
Generally you would detect any "antenna" by resonance (brighter than the background). I'm pretty sure that someone already thought about that, for example to detect guns (all of them are similar in size).
That aside, the closets thing to that is backscatter communication (a passive antenna modulates a continuous signal by changing its res freq/coupling/etc). Even a diode detector should slightly distort the received signal but then again, even a rusted pole, rocks would probably do the same to some extent.
A TEMPEST thread would be interesting. I haven't seen anything about it in years. Here, it's more related to PrepHole paranoids and HaD
than /k/.
>A TEMPEST thread would be interesting
Tempest worked on picking up the raster in CRTs didn't it?
Flat screens would have killed that dead I thought.
Though the keyboard reading should still be mostly reliable, shame about touch screens being so common now, not sure that the inductance will be as detectable as a key and I'm sure that OLED screens aren't nearly as vulnerable to sniffing, if at all.
If you guys start a thread I'll read it. I've never heard of this TEMPEST stuff before and it's fascinating.
>If you guys start a thread I'll read it. I've never heard of this TEMPEST stuff before and it's fascinating.
TEMPEST was a CAI/NSA boogy-man we used to tell each other about in the 2000s or so. It featured heavily in Cryptonomicon so it's at that level of hacker pop culture.
Though like
says, we really mean Van Eck Phreaking. I'd even forgotten that name it's been so long.
We liked to imagine that the CIA sat in a van outside our house watching our monitor when we posted about wikileaks.
TEMPEST was originally Bell Labs picking up interference from electro-mechanical encryption devices used by the US Army in WW2. You are probably thinking of Van Eck Phreaking that was the public introduction to the phenomenon which was indeed picking up EM emissions from a CRT monitor. Pretty much everything is still vulnerable to a certain extent. We call it side-channels and it's a huge area in security research. This is roughly my phd area but I'm 100% civilian, since the start of this war I've been trying to find out more about the practicalities of EW
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv3-ch19-7sep.pdf
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tempestsdr-a-sdr-tool-for-eavesdropping-on-computer-screens-via-unintentionally-radiated-rf/
Especially now with low-cost SDRs you can do a lot.
>That aside, the closets thing to that is backscatter communication (a passive antenna modulates a continuous signal by changing its res freq/coupling/etc). Even a diode detector should slightly distort the received signal but then again, even a rusted pole, rocks would probably do the same to some extent.
Police use something like that for radar detector detectors (where those are illegal).
I found the Spycatcher reference I meant, it's talking about RAFTER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_RAFTER
It was detecting local oscillator leakage which is apparently still a thing and easily done with SDR.
Ukrainians use modified firmware + some hardware modification to overcome this problem
They are just hacking the radio signal out of existance?
No. The drone transmits skewes gps coordinates. Russians see a drone somewhere, but it's in fucking Africa.
> t. knower
Is that an Orca fighter?
Almost: it's a carryall, it'll relocate that mobile sensor array once it undeploys itself.
Seems to me that as drones/controllers emit electronic signals, the best defense would be a small radio tracking anti-drone missile fired out of a conventional grenade gun?
We don't have the tech. Ignoring the EW aspect, switchblade is the closest we have and that's over 100k USD a pop (vs a $500 to $5000 drone).
Exacto was supposedly guided 50cal, but I dunno what happened to that, don't think it ever really worked.
>We don't have the tech.
Of course we do and a 40mm projectile is more than large enough to work.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2020/10/27/us-military-will-use-a-new-generation-of-40mm-grenade-launchers-to-fight-uavs/
Oct 27, 2020
> top end commercial drones are like $10k max
> Cheapest military loitering munitions are at least $50k
Is it just economy of scale? How do they get the price so low
I'm assuming it has something to do with the radio tech but I'm far from an expert on the topic
>civilian drone doesn't care if it lights up the operator's position and immediately goes down to any jamming
>military drone absolutely cannot avoid addressing both of these problems
need a radio expert to explain why
There is nothing you can do to avoid lightning up your position if you're broadcasting. The only thing you can do is encrypt your signals to prevent hacking attempts or others intercepting videos feeds or w/e.
Your only defense from enemy EW assets directing fire your way is ye olde shoot and scoot.
What do you mean "ignoring the EW aspect." Making an aperture to do this would not be difficult, but it would likely have to give the 40mm grenade instructions on location pre-launch, and then detonate in air near the target to hit it with shrapnel. The second half has already been done, but needed more reliability to make it work, see the XM-25. The first half is pretty common already. There are hundreds of anti-radiation systems with perfectly good host antennas to just straight up steal for a project like this.
>In the 2022 budget, the price for a single unit – the airframe, sensors, integrated guidance, warhead, data link, and launcher – was $58,063. This cost does not include additional elements like the guidance unit, which costs around $30,000, or fielding costs, spares, support, training rounds, and simulators.
I am a bit off, but the point still stands.
>HARMs
Absolutely they do not use HARMs, this reeks of the same bullshit that Serbs like to claim that they were using microwave ovens to decoy HARMs. Artillery is possible with some fancy radio finding but it's not going to be that accurate.
this
I'm not even sure HARMs are able to get a lock on SPAAs, let alone drone controller units
they were built around the concept of suppressing network-based air defence structures, ie big ass search radars
>what is directionfinding?
>is the basis of conventional Western armies anti-drone doctrine really possible?
>does early 1900s physics still apply today?
In practice, a single old ESM backpack can geolocate to under 50 meters before your baofeng has finished transmitting.
Digital radios aren't much better. P25 automatically responds to invalid packets by sending out a retransmission request, so an enemy can deliberately broadcast invalid packets to locate your XTS5000 even when you aren't transmitting.
Russians get located a certain way I'm not saying. Russians don't have the same ability to locate Ukrainian drone operators.
It's part of the reason Elon musk's had his fit, but Ukrainians pretty much instantly know where exactly a Russian drone operator is at. Like near instantly. If a Russian drone operator isn't under cover, the second he starts up it's just a game of probability. The longer he's up the more likely he's a dead man because Ukrainians will find a way to blow him up.
It does occur. Radio signals from drone operators can be tracked the same way a phone can. Once the source of a radio transmission is identified it can be attacked by artillery.
if true, the problem is easily fixed in the near future. Just separate the radio antenna from the controller with a 50m long cable, ideally fiber optics.
>a 50m long cable,
The longer, the better. I would increase the distance at least threefold.
> ideally fiber optics.
Any specific reason for that? Simply using a quality coax cable (with extra shielding) removes much complexity like media converters and can be handled a lot rougher.
Fiber optic cables are a fraction of the weight of coax or cat 6, plus several times the transmission distance with zero signal loss. Fiber optic cables don't require any significant shielding, it's inherent to the technology.
> tl;dr - light is vastly superior to electricity in this application
What happens when private Pyle bends the cable a little to much tho?
you execute private Pyle
The current norm is 5-10m high-quality cables with external antennas. Anything more than that and you start losing the signal's strength
>Anything more than that and you start losing the signal's strength
Explain how a coax cable handles 100 GB/sec Internet, plus full-band phone, plus every cable TV channel (about 10000), and manages to send that amount of signal simultaneously to hundreds of houses in a development over several hundred miles of cable.
Yet, operating a single drone cripples the data throughput after 10 meters.
Because, bullfuckingshit. The coax cable I am posting this through runs for almost a mile from my house to the nearest junction. And the service covers something like 2000 or 5000 houses in my local area. They all have cable TV and Internet, many (like mine) support one or more landlines, and I'm guessing each house, on average, is streaming at least two hi-def movies at pretty much any given minute through one service or another so that several people in each house can simultaneously watch whatever the fuck they please at any minute.
And you are claiming a single drone signal will overwhelm the capacity of a coax cable after 10 meters ..?
You might want to make a thread on the topic over at PrepHole and watch everyone laugh at you.
Strength of transmitter idiot, it's at a fequency that emits from wires, the longer the wire the weaker the signal in a specific section, they'll have to retrofit a bunch of boosters to every controlller
This man is actually retarded
Makes sense
What part of "transmitter" strength do you not get? Do you want guys on the field carrying a fucking ball sterilizer with them and several bricks of battery?
You can theorize as much as possible, but I know from the frontline experience that it's a problem our best guys are working on daily for the second year now, and the optimal solution for now is 5-10m. I'm sure there are better ways to do that, but it is what actually happens right now.
Here is a pic of me operating a drone with an external antenna.
Sounds like what you need are decoys. Attach a 5 m cable to a dozen small, cheap drones. Have them all lift and slowly scatter around the area, say a 500 meter radius; they can follow mindless, pre-programmed patterns without an operator and return to a designated collection point. They only need to generate strong, unshielded signals. The real drone is shielded and has the weakest signal while all the others remain in motion at walking speeds or so. Anyone trying to triangulate can only narrow it down to a +/- 1 kilometer area, and the actual drone operator doesn't even have to be entirely inside it.
Also, instead of sitting stationary, put your drone operator inside a mobile platform of some sort, anything from an all-terrain tricycle to a tank, and have them operate the drone with the vehicle in motion. It just needs to move around in a random pattern within a 500 meter or so "safe" zone (no mines). Triangulation will be fucked. This method also allows for larger transmission sources, larger batteries, longer cables.
Good luck. Hopefully something in there is a good enough idea to be useful.
TZD forever.
Coax for an antenna that needs to put the whole power out into the ether and overcome all of the background noise is not the same as coax for transmission which just needs some tiny signal to be picked up by a dedicated circuit connected directly to the end of the line.
It's not about bandwidth. It's about power, both electrical in the cable and actual radio output power.
Attach your coax antenna to a 100 or 500 meter coax for transmission. Your operator is now 100+ meters away from where the transmission can be triangulated. You might need a signal booster dongle where the transmission and antenna cables are joined. Should also be possible to use fiber optic for your transmission cable, saving bulk & weight. Also light enough you can use another drone to drag & carry it instead of a person to deploy. Then you can move the entire antenna/transmission array by having a drone pick the antenna end up, fly to 30 or 80 meters elevation, then fly in another direction and re-deploy ... every 5 or ten minutes, or whatever is "safe." Or, y'know, don't drop the cable until the mission is complete. Just have the antenna drone lift the entire array into the air up to 100 or 200 meters and start wandering around in a random pattern, including random elevation changes, at whatever radius the transmission cable length allows. The antenna drone doesn't require a separate operator, it can have a pre-programmed flight pattern until a recall signal is sent to it.
Anon if you take a pressure washer's hose and cut it open it sprays water all over the place and has jack shit for velocity.
In 'conventional' western doctrine the offset radio relay for a battalion HQ is 1km.
50m doesn't do much. Random artillery shells launched at your area will kill you.
To be fair, vatnagger artillery is just as likely to hit you 50 meters away as it is at 1000 meters.
most of the times the ukranian send in a drone to spot for the artillery so that wouldn't work very well
when you actually control drone manually you light up like lighthouse in radio frequencies - there are not many constant sources of RF radiation on frontline - if someone is searching for that triangulating your position is grade school maths
> grade school maths
Are you having a stroke?
if you have at least two headings on source, calculating where they cross is really simple math...
if you can navigate by compass pen and paper you know everything that is needed to calculate crossing point from two headings taken in known locations - its really basic trigonometry at that point
when you hike you can literally triangulate where you are by getting headings on two known locations like landmarks or peaks and drawing lines on map (or more realistically just putting side of plate compass to the map at right headings)
on pic is real world triangulation of radio signal coming from downed aircraft in mountainous area...
Yep. With a ruler and pencil you don't even need the math lol. X marks the grid. Baofengs and FPVs are a great way to get killed against peer level forces.
>when you hike you can literally triangulate where you are by getting headings on two known locations like landmarks or peaks and drawing lines on map
A friend is super into cross-country skiing, her whole family is. They and their skiing group regularly practice triangulating and locating radio beacons in deep snow as practice for avalanche rescue.
It's not that uncommon a civilian skill.
I did it in scouts too and learnt a bit for sailing.
remember that radio waves most of the times are emitted in all direction and have energy associated with them that decreases by a known rate.
Ukrainians just use starlink to pick them up.
Thirdies don't understand out basic radio waves work. Elon musk nearly turned the system down once he figured it out. Any radio transmissions in Ukraine they pick up.
Ahhh look at this wreck of a thread
>Ukrainians just use starlink to pick them up.
How the hell does starlink let them locate radio emissions in a country?
>How the hell does starlink let them locate radio emissions in a country?
it's an antenna?
>starlink is an antenna
It's a phased array antenna at ground level pointing up.
How do you make it into a nation-sized radio surveillance technology?
>There have been claims
There have been claims that OP is a raging homosexual. This sort of shitty slide thread proves it.
I don't know about whether or not it's true, but especially with modern SDRs being what they are, even bubba can triangulate a signal like that pretty cheaply and easily.