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It’s a radio jammer on a stick.



Also known as a perfect beacon for an anti-radiation missile.

It's not quite "drones HATE this one weird trick". Yes, jamming is a thing, but so are FHSS, ARMs and any number of other countermeasure-counters. No GPS/GNSS/whatever? Inertial navigation systems. No comms at all? All kinds of flavors of automation.

Simple countermeasures may be effective against consumer drones, but the overall problem is an iterative metagame where flawless countermeasures are pretty rare and there's usually a way to adapt or fight back.


I think GPS jamming will be effective for the near future; there are no cheap/small/light INSes; the IMUs on drone are super noisy/will drift.

That said - GPS jamming is the main RF attack that will stop sufficiently autonomous drones.


> Also known as a perfect beacon for an anti-radiation missile.

Wouldn't that just take out the remote drone controller?


I meant that if you intend to use a jammer as a countermeasure against a drone, you're making yourself vulnerable to ARMs. Sure, you can position the jammer away from anything important but that ups your time to redeploy / reconfigure it, reducing its effectiveness. You also lose the jammer, though that might not necessarily be a problem if it's a lot cheaper than an ARM and you have a lot of them available.

But of course ARMs work fine against a drone's controller, too - assuming it isn't using FHSS, though that itself assumes no crazy-advanced anti-FHSS RDF. That's kind of my point regarding how this stuff cuts both ways, how even if a countermeasure works in one instance that's no guarantee it'll continue working, and how countermeasures themselves generally have weaknesses.

Naval engineering provides a lot of examples of this dynamic. Check out what the introduction and development of the torpedo did to the meta.


Jamming sources can be identified and bombed because they are also effectively homing beacons


So what is the battlefield math on this?

Are you spending a $500,000 cruise missle to take out a $200 transmitter mounted to a tree? To allow your $20,000 drone to not get shot down?

What happens when you add 1,000 jammers?

It pretty quickly becomes not super effecient to deal with this.



ARMs are just the flashy example: COTS SDR gear and a howitzer also work pretty okay.




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