AviationBanter - View Single Post

Mark Borgerson

In article .com,
says...

Andrew Swallow wrote:

Many UAVs are flown under remote control. Radio direction finding may
permit the location of its headquarters to be found.

Good point, few countries have enough satellite bandwidth to manage
UAVs the way the US does, so unless Iran is buying bandwidth from
someone else, they'd have to be RC controlled UAVs.

Fully autonomous UAVs are not common today---but they probably will
be in another few years. They would be particularly good
for surveillance of large targets like a CVBG. The UAV could
send out data and wait for very generic microburst commands
like "circle left, 20mile radius". That would make it hard
to attack the controller. While it may be possible get a DF
location on a randomly-timed, 10millisecond, spread spectrum signal
from a mobile command post, it might also be very expensive.

That would make the controller VERY vulnerable to counter fire and
would severly limit range. It would also make the control of the UAV
somewhat easy to jam, or even commandeer.

I would expect that military UAVs would have fairly good encryption
on the links. Heck, even the low-cost ($179) 900 MHz modems we use
on some projects feature frequency hopping and 256-bit AES encryption.

http://www.maxstream.net/products/xt...odem-rs232.php

Mark Borgerson