Why I Don't Take the "age of drones" Seriously

Discussion in 'Warfare / Military' started by Dayton3, Mar 10, 2018.

  1. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    And the answer to this is "not that much".

    Doubt me? Simply go and talk to any HAM operator that you might know.

    Want a 2,000 watt amplifier for a CB radio? You can buy one on E-Bay for under $300 that can be used from a 12 volt car electrical system. And something like that would push out enough power that you can hear it through the speaker of a TV that has been turned off within 100 meters.

    And no, I am not kidding. As a long time CB-HAM operator, I have seen the effect of these kinds of things first-hand. In the early 1990s we had a clown that would drive around the Oakland area with a 5,000 watt amplifier on channel 12, and we would be picking him up 30 miles away on channel 10. He literally blasted away any traffic on 7 channels (his own and 3 in each direction) because he would talk non-stop for an hour or more at a time, pushing so many watts that our FCC compliant rigs (4 watts, 12 watts SSB) could not even hope to override him from 30 miles away.

    From the other operators, I knew that you had to get over 40 miles away and across a mountain range to finally get away from his signal. This clown actually was that much of a nuisance. I know that for over a year the FCC was actually trying to track him down, because he was also disrupting air traffic communications as well out of Oakland International Airport. But he was mobile (in a 1970-'s Ford van according to rumors in the CB community), so they were never able to catch him.

    Several years later my fiancée was always talking about these ghost voices coming out of her TV. I used to think she was kidding, until I heard them myself one night. At 2AM, I suddenly heard voices coming from her TV speaker, even though it was turned off. I listened closely, and realized it was a HAM QSL call. The next night we went for a walk, and sure enough, 2 blocks away I saw a 50 foot mast antenna.

    A few nights later when the voices started, I walked over to that house and knocked on the door. The guy that answered the door was rather shocked when I told him not only his callsign and FCC ID, but that he needed to do a better job in insulating and grounding his equipment.

    And remember, each of these examples I have just given is from accidental jamming and signal bleed. It is actually much easier if that is actually your intention in the first place.

    And while I have let my Technician license expire almost 20 years ago and sold off all my equipment, I still keep in touch with the community. I even still have a CB radio that I throw into my truck when I make long cross-country trips (the last was when I moved from Texas to California in 2012). Although I no longer use a power mike or amplifier, today I use it for traffic updates more than anything else on the rare events that I do use it.

    The simple fact that I use a Cobra 29 LTD today instead of even a Cobra 29 LTD BT shows how little I put into that equipment anymore. Although I still miss my Uniden PC-122XL and my K-40 and 1,000 watt linear.
     
  2. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It helps. Inertial navigation systems drift. In a GPS/INS system, GPS constantly corrects the drift. Lose the GPS, the uncorrected drift begins. It may or may not end up being significant. 10 meters can be the difference between a hit or miss.

    China really loves their GPS jammers, and they've sold many to Iran. There are two types. Saturation jammers just pump out noise. Reflection jammers take the GPS signal input, delay it a few microseconds, and broadcast it back out at higher power. They don't need to know the crypto codes for that. If the GPS receiver locks on to that spoofed signal, the calculated position will be wrong.

    And so goes the arms race. The US responds by making the military side signal more difficult to jam, and making the receivers smarter, so they know to stay locked on to the old correlator peak, and ignore the new spoofed correlator peak.

    Those old INS's are usually more accurate than the new ones. For an INS, bigger is better. Errors are fairly constant, so comparing those errors to the output from bigger gyros makes the errors less significant.
     
  3. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    They do not navigate through GPS. They have never navigated through GPS. The GPS is a backup to the backup. This is not a modern avionics package in a commercial airliner, that links and uses both systems in realtime. The INS does all of the navigation. At certain checkpoints it then polls the TERCOM photographic system to verify it's location "visually".

    All navigation is through INS, TERCOM is the checksum to validate location prior to a course change, or to verify terminal target has been reached. Only some of the newer generation missiles use GPS, but that is only another backup, not part of the actual navigation array. When the INS polls for confirmation of location-target, it polls both TERCOM and GPS. If TERCOM says it is good, it continues. Only if for some reason that TERCOM fails (say a whiteout visual condition where the camera can not validate it's location) will it then finally fall back to the GPS for validation.

    It is not an active part of the system that is sending constant course corrections to the missile.
     
  4. AlphaOmega

    AlphaOmega Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    well at least the eagles in Australia will put up a fight.
     

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