BYDAVID AXE
Fiber-optic first-person-view drones are jam-proof. Sending and receiving signals along millimeters-thick but miles-long optical fibers, these FPV drones are impervious to the radio interference that can ground wireless FPV drones.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to defeat a fiber-optic drone. Ukrainian forces have tracked Russian operators by spotting, in bright sunlight, the reflective fibers spooling out behind a drone—and then following the fibers back to the Russians’ base, potentially kilometers away.
But now there are so many old drone fibers littering the busiest battlefields that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to trace them back to an active drone base.
Ukraine’s fiber-optic drone detection challenge
For months, Ukrainian electronic-warfare expert Serhii “Flash” has been shooting videos of fiber-cluttered fields in order to emphasize the increasing difficulty of countering jam-proof drones. The fields around Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast are apparently the most heavily littered.
The videos “demonstrate the difficulties in trying to trace specific fiber optic cables from the hundreds in the fields back to an operator,” one Canadian electronic warfare expert explained.
That’s surely disappointing to the Ukrainian drone operators who famously struck back against Russian drone operators back in February. The drone team from the Ukrainian national guard’s Kara Dag Brigade hunted down a Russian drone team on the snowy battlefield just south of Vodyane in Donetsk—by following a web of optical fibers back to the Russians’ hideout, and then bombing it.
The tactic doesn’t work if there are fibers practically everywhere, many of them leading back to launch positions the operators have long abandoned. As more drone warfare units on both sides adopt fiber-optic FPV drones, there are fewer ways of defeating them.
No comments:
Post a Comment