this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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I assume that this is because it's transmitting directly to the operator's station, and cutting altitude is letting obstructions get in the way.
Given that Ukraine clearly has a second drone watching, I wonder how hard it would be to permit the hovering drone watching act as a relay, at least for the final approach.
Yeah, exactly. Video signals from drones have a hard time getting through even a grove of trees if it is at a distance. You could bump up the video transmitter power, which would help to an extent. Line if sight, without any obstacles, you can go miles on a 1W transmitter.
Signal relays/amplifiers do exist, but I'm not sure if you could fit one on a regular sized DJI drone, which is probably the kind they are using to watch.
Well, I mean, the DJI drone must have the radio to be sending its own video stream back to HQ, which -- and maybe this is an invalid assumption, dunno what Ukrainian drone tactics are like -- I assume is probably co-located with the loitering munition operator. It looks like that stream is at least as high-bitrate as the munition's stream.
Even if they aren't co-located, I'd assume that they're in a position to communicate with each other.
So all it needs is the ability to pick up the munition's stream, and they have line of sight with each other (necessarily, if one is videoing the other).
Maybe doable with the right equipment. It would require some kind of 3rd party add-on for the DJI drone - that one uses a digital signal, so it wouldn't be able to read the analog signal from the suicide drone out of the box.
I'm not sure how big the amplifiers are for analog signals, but I'm sure with a big enough drone they could get it in the air. This thing for example could probably carry a human lol
The main problem would be latency. The video link is the only feedback the pilot gets from the drone, and the pilot is the only control input for the drone (i.e. no assistance, like you get on dji / gps drones). Adding another ~20-50ms of latency in the video link will make things much harder for the pilot.
20-50ms? Is it really that much? I thought that these are using old school VHF cameras and transmitters so there's no digital compression, transmission, decompression you'd get from something like a internet live stream. The analog artifacts in the POV drone speak to it not being digital.
Still better than being blind?
One would need to take the latency into account though. So the operator would need to know if the signal got relayed, as with such fast moving drones reaction time is pretty important, I guess