Drone warfare in Ukraine and jamming, is Russia not doing enough to counter drone attacks?
| Introduction
Genuinely writing this because FPV drone footage of desperate looking Russian getting killed makes me sad...In the previous article I claimed that the next one will surely be about VPN, or some rotating DNS record system for exitprocess0, but I thought I could write an article about this interrogation I had with the current war happening in Ukraine.
Geopolitics and history do not interest me that much, in fact I'm even quite uncultured on this matter however when it comes to the engineering of war, and the technologies being used, this is a field that love and dive in everyday. I'm honestly grateful for war, it did bring a lot of the tools we have and use everyday like computers, internet, and actually just great advancements in technology in general... All these "technological boosts" seemed to have emerged from a motivation only war could provide. Diamonds are made under pressure, lol...
Quick disclaimer here, obviously I haven't been in the army, I'm not working as an engineer in this field, I'm not exposing anything or even blame Russia for not caring about their soldiers, I'm just giving my honest take on the current situation with the "knowledge" I have (not that anyone would care lol...), and would you guess that? I'm self taught.
| Current situation (for those who didn't know)
Lot of things happening in Ukraine lol:
Modern warfare is sure strange and original, that war did bring us some very interesting concepts the one playing a big role currently are Ukrainian FPV drones.
I'm not talking about your average American UAV MQ-9 reaper but about the common hobby FPV drone people use to make crazy videos and tricks. But instead of a Go-Pro to record stunts they load a big RPG-7 warhead at the bottom and STICK IT WITH TAPE:
Isn't this adorable? Legend say, if you kiss the warhead it won't kill you.
Of course there is different type of drone used in the current conflict for which this blog post doesn't apply (like full AI drone attack or even fiber optics drones (yes drone with literal cable attached to them), or the non improvised type of drone like TB2), Ukraine do also use these type of drone but here we will focus on these cheap Kamikaze RF FPV drone which are the most used.
Ukraine became the biggest drone producer worldwide because of this (see? war pressure pushing tech forward):
These drones are super cheap and easy to make, and... weirdly effective?
Well I never fought an FPV drone before but I can completely understand, these drone moves quicker than you (FPV drone can easily reach over 70mph) are small and so difficult to aim at (+stress), soldiers on the battlefield are forced to use terrain, trees etc... We've all seen these kind of video :
They estimate that Ukrainian drone killed 20 000 Russians, 80% of causalities are inflicted by Ukrainian drones. That's honestly what makes me sad, who could believe that one day that hobbyist FPV drone sound would be the last thing you'll hear. Couldn't they do something about it? Some soldiers are literally on the ground, accepting their fate, or some of them simply stop moving believing the drone won't see them anymore, is it that hopeless? Here is my take:
| Just jam the drone
I will overuse the term "jamming" in this article so here is my quick explanation of it : Basically if you don't want your ops to communicate, you essentially yell as hard as you can so they can't hear themselves anymore. Except you do it on radio with random noise on a specific or on a wide range of frequencies with (A LOT) of power. Russia is already using some crazy jammers in the current conflict, like they OBLITERATE the whole spectrum with these :Let me present you the Russian electronic warfare jamming truck "R-330Zh Zhitel"
I love these, they fight an electromagnetic war we do not see.
Thing is, blindly jamming a whole set of frequencies is making the communication for them impossible too. I heard some soldiers are equipped with a frequency spectrum analyser and can call these jammer to start sending on the specific frequency the drone is on but here is the thing, what if the soldiers themselves had a portable jammer, they could effectively respond faster, and possibly without interfering with other communication & friendly drones. Here is why I believe it's possible. There is 2 things you could try jamming and both are doable :
- The frequency of which the drone transmit the video feed (jam the pilot reception): Since you do not know where the pilot is, we can forget about antenna gain, we just have to transmit everywhere wih a dipole or similar. The video feed is quite literally everything the pilot has to control the drone along with some basic telemetry data, all you would need is to disrupt that video feed means transmitting stronger than the little pathetic lightweight drone. Surely it's less than 5W.
- The frequency at which the drone receive (jam the drone receiver): That's where it gets interesting, the signal received by the drone isn't high power because these FPV drones travels miles, the pilot emitting the signal transmit blindly in every direction. You as the soldier see the drone so you could use a very high gain directional antenna with a narrow radiation pattern such as a Yagi and transmit with only 2W, 5W directly at the drone receiver, your noise will completely cover the legit radio control signal, and effectively make the drone uncontrollable. With very low power, no need a huge jamming truck if you know where the receiver is.
Like imagine a $30 transmitter from aliexpress with a $50 2.5Ghz power amplifier with $10 yagi antenna + a battery could save your life...
Take for example THIS, I swear even this with a Yagi antenna would be enough (I just doubt this one will sweep the right frequency tho):
Funny, note the cute name they gave it : the "sweep signal source generator" :3. Like what are you sweeping, at 2W if it's for bluetooth why you need that much power when bluetooth is meant to be transmitted at only 100mW, they be sweeping something really strong but we do not know what (╥_╥) (it's just a jammer, lol)... But the term "jamming" may just sound too bad for the platform.
| Limitation what could or is currently used to mitigate jamming
Ukraine could be using frequency hoping or just have the ability to easily switch the frequency of their drone in flight. Frequency hoping is generally around the same center frequency, like bluetooth. Reminds me not long time ago I made a Bluetooth jammer with GNU radio to stop the music of bluetooth speakers. Bluetooth do have frequency hoping (FHSS) around 79 channels of 1MHz bandwidth, HackRF (the SDR I use) as a pathetic transmitting power of around 100mW and a maximum bandwidth of 20Mhz, I needed to transmit as strong as the transmitter (who focuses all its energy on a single channel) but on a 1Mhz * 79 channels bandwidth. Solution was if you can't completely stop it make it barely usable, by manually jumping accross channels (like that cute aliexpress jammer) and focus the signal with a high gain 2.5Ghz yagi antenna. That was enough to pretty much stop the music (as long as you were close from the bluetooth receiver), if you know where the receiver is you can generally confuse it, even with very low power. Here is the gnu radio file if anyone is interested by the way :BT_Jammer.grc | Download
All this to say that you do not need to completely jam a frequency when you can disrupt it enough to make the drone unusable, like imagine if you want to precisely hit a soldier but the drone barely respond to your input. A low power portable jammer could still considerably disrupt a drone using frequency hoping
Like even if the drone use a second transceiver to operate on another frequency range (like we are talking 2Ghz to 5Ghz) you could still detect it and with a more expensive jammer supporting a wider frequency range to disrupt the drone..
| Challenges to solve and AI drones
I believe Russia do care, afterall like I said earlier most of Russian causalities are literally inflicted by drone, but I understand that there is a multitude of constraints and challenge you cannot just build an effective jammer, mass produce it so that every soldier have it.Having the concept on paper is easy, producing one is too, now mass producing a usable reliable, robust jammer every soldier can handle working in different conditions is certainly more challenging, and definitely will take more time...
There might also be some problem concerning certifications like can any soldiers handle a jammer? When you are so distant from the conflict there is so many things you think and believe you could do better but when you are in, you understand that there is so many little factors that makes these simple solutions in fact, complicated. I feel the same way when building a project, at the beginning you see the easy path, but then when you actually start working on it you see a multitude of tiny complications you haven't thought of before. I did not create portable jammer that automatically disrupt drones signals receptions and did not fight in Ukraine war...
With that said hopefully Russia will come up with something and maybe Ukraine would then fully AI automate their drone building some super powerful AI that can run on minimal hardware and become the leader in that field so that Russia once again come back with who knows what, maybe blinding drone cameras? A crazy fancy portable EMP gun?...
Ukraine already made some experimental AI system for FPV kamikaze drone (they already managed to execute a perfect AI drone strike on some Russian bombers btw). In the future AI may automatically take control if the drone is being jammed, that's almost sci-fi if you think about it, AI powered robot kamikaze drone...
Russia do have big drone factories too, and use Iranian drone against Ukraine ("Geran-2" drones), who knows where this is going.
In the end we all know that, in war there is no winners but only victims...
Yeah, so just wanted to write that somewhere. Hopefully I taught yall something, have a nice rest of your day, exit the process, cleanly.