We’ve seen that drone advertising has now officially become a thing with this Candy Crush bollocks. How easy would it be to wreak havoc on them?
FYI: Drone jammers are not legal in the US per FCC regulations. "The use of “cell jammers” or similar devices designed to intentionally block, jam, or interfere with authorized radio communications (signal blockers, GPS jammers, or text stoppers, etc.) is a violation of federal law.
I’m going to lazily repost something I commented that has my thoughts on the matter:
How difficult would it be to destroy covertly? I’ve got a drone, and it’s quite a feeble being. Obviously these things would be a lot bigger than my little camera drone, but it really can’t take a whole lot, surely? My drones rotors sometimes get stuck when I land it in grass that’s over a few inches long. Surely that means a sturdy piece of string could tangle up those advertiser drones.
How surveilled are they? How does one even surveill something so high in the sky in pitch blackness? How hard would they investigate the destruction? It would be a very fucking expensive thing, if even one drone was destroyed. One drone would probably fly into the rest though and then you got mega damage bucks on your hands…
What is the best method of destroying them, do you think? Send up your own drone and drop a bunch of netting over a section? Perhaps having your own drone would be too traceable. Maybe it wouldn’t if it was a home built one though. No trackers that feed info back to a company like MAVIC, for example.
Can you just shoot them? Don’t you USA denizens have guns? Pretty sure that would work.
Flak cannon from Red Alert
Solid enough drone that it could stay airborn after being jostled pretty hard and hang a few 6~12 inch pipes from the bottom and just fly around the drone formation. Ding a rotor and or the protective cage around the rotor a few times and I’d imagine that would drop the offending drone. Netting would have to be dropped (which means you’d only get one shot before needing to reload) and a chain/rope would need to be jettisoned if/when it got bound up in the target drone or else you lose your rig.
Jamming is definitely illegal, but of you can do it from a mobile spot, get in, get out, you might not be in bad shape. Jamming works by transmitting noise louder than the control signal. This could be made more effective by using a high gain directional “beam” antenna such as a Yagi or a dish. Since you’d be pointing it into the sky, you’d theoretically be limiting the number of targets on the ground which recieve interference (but you want to make sure you’re not fucking up VOR/DME or ATC communications). It is also important to know what frequency you’re trying to jam. Ideally you want to jam just enough of the spectrum to block the control signal without screwing up much else.
I dont want anyone going to jail, but from a practical standpoint, jamming is probably the best bang for the buck and lowest risk vs. building a swarm of combat drones or firing a shotgun into the air repeatedly from Battery Park in the general direction of Jersey City.
As far as I now they’re treated as aircraft by the FAA, with all the legal consequences that entails. They also had to get a special permit to fly the advertising drones at that altitude and in that airspace.
