Reddit mentions of Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Elite Edition Quadcopter - Jungle (Discontinued by manufacturer)
Sentiment score: 0
Reddit mentions: 3
We found 3 Reddit mentions of Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Elite Edition Quadcopter - Jungle (Discontinued by manufacturer). Here are the top ones.
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Easily updates to meet FAA requirementsRemote control quadricopter controlled using an iOS or Android smartphone or tablet720p high-definition live video streaming & recording to smartphone or tablet while flyingRecord & share videos & pictures straight from AR. Free Flight piloting app
Specs:
It really is. As a civilian, I can go pickup an extremely high-end, GoPro ready, all bells and whistles, quad-copter drone for $1,300. Or a pretty damn good one, including 720p HD video, for $300.
i'm sure the makers of the Parrot AR Drone will not be pleased.
Sure... but it's a cheap smart-weapon. Mortars have a CEP that's measured in dozens of meters - the 120mm mortar is nearly one-and-a-half football fields at maximum range.
If you wired a little RF booster into a video broadcasting antenna to send even poor quality video back to the controller's location they could use that to fly a drone overhead of a row of equipment - or the chow hall. Fly it into the target or get directly overhead then just turn it off and let it fall for boom (using the launch-arming tripwire method).
You can buy a 720p broadcasting quadcopter that you can fly out of line-of-sight using your iPad now for less than $400. Strip that video system and antenna, attach to an amplifier w/ noise filter, and broadcast that back to the controller station (which had a simple parabolic set up to receive it) from the attack drone with a mini directional or helical on the back of the drone - it would only have to reach a few miles for the controller to be hidden from base personnel except for the antennas. The base jammer wouldn't do anything to the outgoing video signal from the drone as far as I understand about RF jammers (again, IANAEE). The signal quality would only have to be good enough to see where you were going.
Combining such drone attacks with general remote-launch rocket assbagerry or hit-&-run sniper fire to get base personnel looking towards the horizon instead of straight overhead might be another alternative to getting the drone past visual and audio detection by base personnel at night.
It's scary enough for me to immediately start to think of effective defenses, and right now I'm thinking that's a sky-scanning thermal camera that could feed the target to a LaWS. That is waaaay more expensive than the drones would be.