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Is There a Drone In Your Backyard?

*Cato* Wrote: May 17, 2012 2:54 PM

Oh, I think about this stuff quite often, since I make my living in the "drone" industry. The Army and Navy operate the Hunter and Shadow systems for battlefield management -- not much of an operating radius for either airframe. And the sensor and optics packages are low-grade for each. And they only operate line-of-sight. In addition to MQ-1 and MQ-9, the AF also operates the RQ-4 Global Hawk (Block 40 version); the Block 30 will be retired in FY13. They also operate the -120 Sentinel, same one that went down in Iran. Bottomline is there isn't enough SATCOM bandwidth globally to operate even the 200 airframes in the inventory at one time. It would take many satellite launches to come even close to providing the KU-band or K-band...

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Is There a Drone In Your Backyard?

Earlier this week, the federal government announced that the Air Force might be dispatching drones to a backyard near you. The stated purpose of these spies in the sky is to assist local police to find missing persons or kidnap victims, or to chase bad guys.

If the drone operator sees you doing anything of interest (Is your fertilizer for the roses or to fuel a bomb? Is that Sudafed for your cold or your meth habit? Are you smoking in front of your kids?), the feds say they may take a picture of you and keep it. The...

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