Flock is best known for the roadside cameras now operating in more than 6,000 US communities. But the company is increasingly betting on drones that can be...
Privacy groups warn that flying plate readers could expand surveillance far beyond roadside cameras.
In practical terms, drones can’t respool their fiberoptic tether - in any dynamic environment, the fiber will at some point become entangled preventing it from being retracted. While there are prototype systems that use Power Over Fiber to keep a drone (and usually it’s cable to prevent entangling) aloft indefinitely, all of those I’m aware of have an extremely limited weight capacity (far too little to support a decent optical setup) and aren’t much of a concern.
Otherwise, a pursuit drone with an optical tether is a poor solution; it will leave fiber strewn behind it, the fiber is extremely vulnerable to accidental damage from something like a car or being wrapped around a sharp edge, has limited range and requires the base station to be static (so one could simply Hit Da Bricks their way out of a pursuit). There’s also almost never a concern about wide area jamming in the civilian locales that these might be deployed in, so there’s no real reason to use fiber instead of military style frequency-hopping radios.
That hypothetical microwave cannon would be an equal threat to both (if it exists), and if someone deploys a jammer to evade pursuit you can simply identify the epicenter of the disruption and follow them that way (something the FCC does regularly). And that’s ignoring that there are AI-enhanced systems that can follow a target autonomously until the drone is able to reestablish a connection to the controller.
Honestly, birdshot and other drones are probably going to be the best counter to these systems.
I wish you made this comment a while ago, because at this point I’m done discussing this due to all the bad faith shenanigans I’ve been getting here, so I’m not even going to bother reading it purely due to exhaustion.
Eeh, fair enough I suppose. Basically optical fiber is impractical for police use, but these drones are a great use case for frequency hopping radios like what’s used in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, that means the most likely counter to these available to the average person is going to be shotguns and flying other drones into them.
My main irritation that spurred the comment you replied to is in response to “heheheh drone interception is so easy, I personally invented 500 techniques.”
I’m not a drone expert. Maybe you are. But that person clearly is not.
Oh no for sure, that guy’s talking nonsense. You can build a directed and relatively quite high power microwave antenna at home no problem - but building an n-tron (I’ll be fucked if I can remember which type of ‘-tron’ it is, I confess. Gravitron?) with enough power to take out a drone from more than a few meters away is well beyond what’s feasible to construct by yourself at home.
In practical terms, drones can’t respool their fiberoptic tether - in any dynamic environment, the fiber will at some point become entangled preventing it from being retracted. While there are prototype systems that use Power Over Fiber to keep a drone (and usually it’s cable to prevent entangling) aloft indefinitely, all of those I’m aware of have an extremely limited weight capacity (far too little to support a decent optical setup) and aren’t much of a concern.
Otherwise, a pursuit drone with an optical tether is a poor solution; it will leave fiber strewn behind it, the fiber is extremely vulnerable to accidental damage from something like a car or being wrapped around a sharp edge, has limited range and requires the base station to be static (so one could simply Hit Da Bricks their way out of a pursuit). There’s also almost never a concern about wide area jamming in the civilian locales that these might be deployed in, so there’s no real reason to use fiber instead of military style frequency-hopping radios.
That hypothetical microwave cannon would be an equal threat to both (if it exists), and if someone deploys a jammer to evade pursuit you can simply identify the epicenter of the disruption and follow them that way (something the FCC does regularly). And that’s ignoring that there are AI-enhanced systems that can follow a target autonomously until the drone is able to reestablish a connection to the controller.
Honestly, birdshot and other drones are probably going to be the best counter to these systems.
I wish you made this comment a while ago, because at this point I’m done discussing this due to all the bad faith shenanigans I’ve been getting here, so I’m not even going to bother reading it purely due to exhaustion.
Have a good one.
Eeh, fair enough I suppose. Basically optical fiber is impractical for police use, but these drones are a great use case for frequency hopping radios like what’s used in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, that means the most likely counter to these available to the average person is going to be shotguns and flying other drones into them.
My main irritation that spurred the comment you replied to is in response to “heheheh drone interception is so easy, I personally invented 500 techniques.”
I’m not a drone expert. Maybe you are. But that person clearly is not.
Oh no for sure, that guy’s talking nonsense. You can build a directed and relatively quite high power microwave antenna at home no problem - but building an n-tron (I’ll be fucked if I can remember which type of ‘-tron’ it is, I confess. Gravitron?) with enough power to take out a drone from more than a few meters away is well beyond what’s feasible to construct by yourself at home.