For being a false flag I'd not be surprised.
Still, few outside of military radio development know gov'ts now routinely
use UWB underlays for numerous purposes, including cognitive radio. AFAIK,
there's no regulatory prohibition against UWB in the ISM bands, so
development and testing could easily proceed OTA. Once tested, changing the
bands could be straightforward.
I am using the term "UWB" broadly and not the more restrictive regulatory
definition. If the drones are not configured to use HD video the required
bandwidth is miniscule and the process gain (PG) substantial compared with
the baseband data rates. Very high PG makes signal detection and jamming
more difficult.
Probably also coming soon, very high PGs wherein the codes, bandwidth and
frequencies quickly hop according to a shared secret between the drone and
its controller. This combination is being explored for possible Next
Generation military comms.
On Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 1:20 AM jim bell On Friday, December 21, 2018, 12:23:44 PM PST, Steven Schear <
schear.steve@gmail.com> wrote: One has to wonder if the Gatwik dronners simply found a way to modify the
wifi frequency placing it out of the ISM band and the military's radio
countermeasures were specifically only for those frequencies. That sounds relatively simple. One problem might be that on a spectrum
analyzer, a set of WiFi-looking signals, a few tens of MHz from where WiFi
ought to be, would stick out like a sore thumb. The large majority of airport-visiting people have cell phones, and many
of them will be accessing WiFi at any given time. It seems to me that
anybody attempting to control a drone secretly might want to "hide in plain
sight", using an existing WiFi system. Jim Bell