General interest BBC video of a Ukrainian Army drone mission that seems to run up against a Russian EW jammer.
What I found most interesting was the fact the Ukrainians home built their drones and from the screenshots seem to be using Mission Planner as their interface.
As a side issues I was debating if the Ukrainians were using a single service GPS receiver or a multi service GPS/GLONASS/Beidou receiver and if using multi service would have made them more jam resistant due to accessing satellites on a wider variety of frequencies.
They’re definitely using Mission Planner. Though it’s an older version of it (~6-12 months old). That would imply that they’re likely using certain other open source components as well…
Given the cheap cost of building this sort of UAV (<$2000), I’m not surprised that they’re using them. Though the reliability and training/support is far lower than your a standard military UAV.
In regards to GNSS jamming, the frequencies of GPS/GLONASS/Beidou are all well known, so it’s not difficult to jam all of them.
I’m thinking more in terms of collateral jamming. I assume the Russian military will be using GLONASS and would not want to deny their own GNSS access, so if the Ukrainians made use of a receiver that accessed GLONASS they could maintain access to at least one constellation.
There is a presumption in there that the Russians would not just accept the loss of precision geolocation data in a limited area for a limited time for the benefit of taking down the drone and just bombard that whole part of the spectrum and accept the electronic fratricide.
Interesting to know what type of jammer the Ukranian was referring to if the Russians only had 10 in their inventory. The Russians are reported to make common use of GPS jammers and were exporting them to Iraq before the second Gulf War so it may not have been your run of the mill jammer, or the Ukranian had no idea what he was on about.