A bubb-bble!
Posted on 10/01/2019 8:42:47 AM PDT by BeauBo
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is putting up an invisible bubble along the southern border to stop drug-smuggling drones mid-flight.
The agency signed a nearly $1.2 million contract with Citadel, a company that develops systems to counter unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as drones. The company will provide CBP with six Titan Counter Drone defense systems, according to a CBP spokesperson.
The kits include a signal box that deploys a 3-km “bubble” around a protected area and a monitor to identify and alert the user to any drones entering that airspace. Any drones entering the bubble are commandeered by the system and set safely on the ground.
According to Citadel, the signal intelligence and targeted jamming tool can be deployed within three minutes.
The company says its system uses artificial intelligence to stay on top of new drone technologies. Along with the physical systems, the CBP contract also includes 12 months of software upgrades, support and training, as well as a one-year warranty.
“Drones have become a greater challenge along the border. Our nation's border agents deserve the safest and most advanced technology available,” Citadel CEO Christopher Williams said in a release. “Citadel's automated solution provides front-line operators with awareness of drone threats and decision-making to respond faster than the adversary.”
While the initial rollout is limited to six systems, Williams told Nextgov the contract could expand in the future.
“Technology is being deployed in limited quantities in 2019 after months of testing and validation,” he said. “Following 2020 presidential budget decisions, the potential for additional systems at larger quantities will be explored.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nextgov.com ...
This kind of technology program could deploy quickly and cheaply, but has limited range. Scouts might be able to determine where they are, and where they are not, before sending their actual payload over.
Might be cheaper to line the boarder walls with skeet shooters with night goggles! :/
This would be a good chance for drone pilots in the military to practice shooting down enemy drones...just sayin
Put a bounty on the drones. Let Capitalism do the rest.
Might be cheaper to line the boarder walls with skeet shooters with night goggles! :/
I like that better. Have fun while protecting the border!
If this is true, the cartel's drone designers are idiots.
Unless they have attack drones that can shoot them down, I don't think they will ever be able to actually stop drones designed to deliver payload to a target.
“Unless they have attack drones that can shoot them down”
There are separate systems available, that hit them with a beam of energy, which causes them to drop out of control.
The field is evolving pretty quickly, and lots of kinds of drones are commercially available.
Cartels don't design or build drones.
They buy off-the-shelf technology from companies like DJI.
That is a mistake. They build submarines. Why wouldn't they hire competent people to build them hardened drones?
That wouldn't work if I was designing the drone. I'm pretty sure a lot of other people know how to harden a drone against microwave energy. You would think the Cartels could afford to hire people who know what they are doing.
The field is evolving pretty quickly, and lots of kinds of drones are commercially available.
Using a commercially available drone is a mistake. These things should be designed so that they can't be jammed and they can't be damaged by a microwave beam weapon.
Good idea
Typically, they build semi-submersible or low-profile boats, not true submarines.
Why build a custom UAV when you can buy an industrial DJI drone with all the fixings for $5k?
A multi-rotor UAV is not a simple machine. In addition to the motors and props, you also need the motor controllers, 3D gyro, radio equipment, GPS and a motherboard to integrate all of the above to make it usable.
All of the photos I've seen of cartel drones show commercial drones. Most are DJI machines.
If you've got links that show cartels using custom drones, please post it.
I'm not sure how much RC modeling you've done, but the drones are radio-controlled. You can't harden a radio-controlled device against microwaves. These days, radios utilize frequency-hopping technology, but that can't prevent jamming.
These things should be designed so that they can't be jammed and they can't be damaged by a microwave beam weapon.
These are controlled by two means: Radio and GPS. You can't prevent jamming or being shot down by a microwave without spending millions of dollars to harden the equipment and encrypt the communication.
Because a custom UAV isn't going to get taken out by a microwave beam weapon or an attempt to spoof GPS, or an attempt to gain root control. It will shrug all that stuff off and just keep flying to it's destination.
The question is whether or not you want to lose for 5K, or win for 10K. Considering they might be carrying a million dollars worth of drugs, I would think it would be in their best interest to neutralize these methods of capturing drones.
You can harden a radio against microwaves. It's not even hard.
Jamming is also only a problem if you remain in range of the Jammer. If you know where the jamming bubbles are, it's not great feat to program the drone to fly far beyond it's range and then reacquire a control signal within some radius of your drop point.
Also, I wouldn't rely solely on GPS for navigation. I would use the GPS, but I would give an inertial navigation system outvoting rights over the GPS. They can spoof GPS, but they can't spoof your inertial movements and orientations. Use inertial guidance to get your gross location, and when the GPS and inertial approximately confirm each other, you can switch back to GPS for accuracy.
The drugs didn't cost them millions to produce. That's the estimated street value.
A hardened drone can't be built for $10k and I challenge you to prove it can.
From: US Border Patrol Drones Hacked by Drug Cartels
The drug cartels are hacking US Border Patrol drones in order to cross the US-Mexican border illegally.
It has been reported by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency that drug traffickers have hacked their UAVs to cross the US-Mexican border illegally.
UAVs (unmanned air vehicles) are being used by the US military quite extensively already and now these are in use by the other US law enforcement agencies such as border patrol and local police.
However, the difference is that the military owned drones are quite expensive and worth millions of dollars whereas the drones used by law enforcement and local agencies are smaller and less expensive. Understandably, the smaller drones aren’t as effective in evading hack attacks.
That is because to minimize their cost, various standard drone modules need to be deleted including the one that ensures the security of the drone in the case of GPS spoofing, which is a trivial cyber-attack.
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