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audiomagnate t1_isthafw wrote

I'm betting the Ukrainians will figure out how to stop these things soon. The Vietnamese used a system of spotters with telephones and small arms to take out low flying planes fifty years ago.

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mylefthandkilledme t1_ists3h5 wrote

Ukrainians are shooting them down. Problem is that they come in swarms. You can shoot down 37/40, but the 3 that get through end up in apartments or markets or schools.

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scooby_doo_shaggy t1_istlfsa wrote

Well there's already videos of Ukrainian police with AK's and shit shooting these down. Safe to assume most Western/NATO countries have fairly adequate defenses/funding for dealing with drone strikes.

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oneplusetoipi t1_istoa0k wrote

I think they should spread microphones out and use voice recognition software to identify the drones. They can be triangulated so their positions and flight paths are identified. Multiple weapons systems can knock them out.

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warplants t1_isu677u wrote

Even better if you listen for radio waves instead of sound, since radio travels much further faster. (This is called ELINT and is already in widespread use.)

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Aceticon t1_isuvnma wrote

Actually sorta that but maybe not in the way you meant it: it's unlikelly that the drone will be in communication with the home base as it's supposed to be autonomous and besides the whole radio thing is commonly used to detect enemy forces so it's the kind of thing any decent system designer would think of, plus GPS receivers are passive - they merelly listen to signals from satellites and use them for triangulation - so there are no emissions from those either.

However, every electric thing does emit some amount of noise in the radio spectrum and the engines possibly also (due to the sparks used to ignite the fuel), so maybe a ground-based wideband receiver with a directional antenna (and it doesn't even need to be a narrow reception window) aiming with the appropriate angle up (basically just enough to stop detecting ground-based devices) will detect them as, even though the signals are weak, there is normally nothing in the air that emits signals quite like that all the way up to Low Earth Orbit (and maybe not even there if the sparks in the engine are what is being detected). Other possibilities involve balloons as there are antenna configurations which allow avoiding catching signals from below, so the "line of sight" of a balloon (just tethered in place) for detection is probably quite long.

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