Semi-secret US Air Force long-endurance spy drone breaks cover | Hacker News Reader

Semi-secret US Air Force long-endurance spy drone breaks cover

newatlas.com

21 pointsBrajeshwar12 comments

> Unfortunately, one hard lesson is that the Reaper is vulnerable

Looks like they're working on that: "New Electronic Warfare Pod Turns Marine MQ-9 Reaper Into “A Black Hole”" https://www.twz.com/news-features/new-electronic-warfare-pod...

> ULTRA has been deployed to an undisclosed location

Says the subtitle of the image with the very distinctive view of the Al Dhafra Air Base's control tower.

Given it doesn't have clear inlets, I'm going to guess it has a focus on noise and is probably an electric Stemme.

Children of insurgencies https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2017/o...

Sounds like this new craft is $8mil/each, so about 1/4th the cost of a Reaper.

https://armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2024/us-air-...

Looks like a sailplane without a cockpit. It might even use thermals and ridge lift to prolong flight time...in the right conditions it could fly indefinitely as long as it had a way to recharge the battery for operating the control surfaces.

Gosh that looks like a DA20 except with longer nose, higher wings, retractable gear and tail wheel.

It uses GPS so it's dead on arrival against near peer adversaries

It has "hardened" GPS, whatever that means, and it presumably is not singularly reliant on just GPS

Hardened GPS is real but military missile systems with it have had a very hard time in Ukraine against Russian targets. Reasons unknown.

You can pump a lot more energy into electronic warfare systems on the ground than in the air. The offensive missiles are also not the latest and greatest

If the GPS signals are coming from above and the jamming is coming from below wouldn't this be strongly resistant to such attacks assuming the receiver is shielded from signals from below?

Edit: Perhaps it's not a good assumption that a near peer would only jam or spoof from below. If they have satellites above then they could interfere from above as well.

Also found this:

> Signals received from GNSS Satellites are usually very weak and are thus susceptible to deliberate or unintentional interference. It is very easy for an adversary to intentionally introduce RF interference into the GPS frequency bands, referred to as jamming, and deny the user position, navigation, and timing (PNT) data. Using CPRA antennas can help protect against this changing the antenna reception patterns to null out the jamming signals and direct the beams towards the satellites.

https://www.everythingrf.com/community/what-are-controlled-r...

And another article which gives an overview of how controlled reception pattern antennas work (CRPA): https://www.gpsworld.com/anti-jam-technology-demystifying-th...

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