Drawing a splodge in roughly the location (not sure if there's range info either? I doubt it if it's passive) overlaid on the video likely won't cut it...
One big issue with radar is that it has the same problem pilots and human observers do: it struggles to distinguish drones from anything else in the sky (birds, balloons, planes, etc.). This is an active and improving research space, but by and large with radar, when your pilots report a drone, you still don't know how to figure out if it's the typical mis-identification or something real.
From documentation, QuadRF: Operating frequency range of 4.9 - 6.0 GHz (C-Band).
It would be great to have a wider range like other SDRs but of course the cost will increase exponentially.
RF drone detection has been a challenging problem for quite a while. Lots of solid state radar/RF detection products have emerged in the space, but it is not a trivial problem. And that is for drones with active RF comms, anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect at a far enough range to actually do something about.
Since ~2022 and accelerated by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, governments are now behind both private and open source for frontier technology.
The companies that captured government contracts in the last century can’t move fast enough to bring tech into the government and national technology policy and funding is collapsing compared to the private sector
That’s new in history
Open source doesn't mean the end of competition, since we are a competitive species.
I think the future economy is going to be some sort of UBI + large open source projects
They came out at $500
Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.
Point still stands that they initially said it would be $50-$100. And its going for $500.
I have heard claims of devices (mostly TVs) supposedly coming with secret 5G cell uplinks built in [never heard a specific model mentioned though].
If there were more variants covering more commonly-used RF bands, people could walk around and literally check for once.
(incidentally i'm sure three letter agencies have had this sort of tech in their bug-detecting toolkit for a LONG time)
This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.
Correct, there is no bullet proof cuas system to this date.
> anything flying autonomously is even harder to detect
Not just autonomously, because even in autonomous mode you would still need other RF like gnss, but you can fly drones without any rf signature at all and utilize a pre captured images saved on board to navigate the drone accurately using its cameras (normal or thermal). In this case, rf interference won’t work, it won’t be detected based on rf signature either, you will have to rely solely on visuals and acoustic, fly at night, and only left with acoustics.. it is a very hard task from technical standpoint.
Scene_Cast2•1h ago
raziel2701•22m ago
peteforde•4m ago
Being able to do local soft-run testing on-site to be sure that you eliminate the easy 90% of issues before you get to the lab would be a huge win.
varispeed•4m ago