In the past two years, as the concept of low-slow small drones has become popular, various multi-axis rotary drones have entered the squad-level troop unit as situational awareness equipment, bringing considerable changes to the environment of the modern battlefield. It is this ability to make the battlefield more transparent, which has allowed major military powers to study any effective and cheap means to target these DJI analogues besides holding anti-drone guns.
For example, Americans have built special electromagnetic interference anti-drone vehicles, Russians have built new micro anti-drone missiles, our army has blossomed in multiple fields such as lasers, electromagnetic interference, etc. Seeing that the research and development of major countries is so hot, India, which is considered a military power in South Asia, will naturally not be willing to fall behind. In the past two days, they have designed the means they designed to effectively detect and intercept drone - Eagle. It is not a weapon named Eagle, but they took the animal Eagle and carried special equipment for it as a weapon for anti-drone.
According to the news released by the Indians, the main goal of this so-called anti-drone weapon is to deal with various small four-axis drones, specialized training of the eagles to identify the drones, allowing them to find the drones themselves and shoot them down and destroy them. As a combat platform, the Eagle did not have any weapons to carry. It simply tied a camera and a communication antenna on its head to pass images back to the trainers on the ground. I think the way to shoot down the drone is to rely on the kinetic energy of the Eagle to directly impact it.
Traditionally, training animals like eagles to perform this kind of driving away small aerial targets is a way of having a long history. For a long time, humans have relied on trained eagles to perform bird-repelling tasks in airports and other places, turning bird-repellent into intercepting drones, which is of course feasible in principle. Moreover, considering that the Eagle's optical recognition ability for targets such as drones is more accurate than the traditional pulse Doppler principle radar , it is used as a means of anti-drone combat. As long as it is trained properly, it will have a certain effect.
However, this modification made by Indians looks very unserious. I simply tied a webcam to my head and used it as an anti-drone weapon. It makes people feel quite confusing to tie a camera. After all, you are an animal, not a flapping drone that looks like an eagle. If you tie a camera, you can't tell the eagle to target and remotely control the eagle to turn. It's not that the load is added out of thin air, and it seems meaningless to add to the snake. I don't know what strange things Indians are thinking about.
Of course, the most interesting thing is the model of this camera tied to the eagle's head. Judging from the high-definition photos taken by Indians, the model of this camera is called FX-797T, which is a cheap camera produced by an unknown company in my country for use for drones or other similar equipment. The resolution is only 600 TV lines with an ancient level, and it outputs a 480P resolution video picture. As a device from 6-7 years ago, it can only be said to be barely useful. Now it is just how to look at it. But even such a low-level simple camera is imported from China, and cannot solve the problem of independent production. Even the integration is simply tied to the eagle's head. It can be said that it can reflect the actual situation of the Indians' overall industrial capacity under the glamorous appearance.
After all, if you really have some industrial strength, with the Indians' self-esteem of a great country in recent years, you should choose to use pure domestic camera parts. If you pursue it a little, you should also find a lens with better performance to make it look more elegant. Of course, it is also because of this weak industrial strength that Indians cannot obtain ready-made anti-low slow and small drone solutions in the international market, and their own defense industrial capabilities do not support themselves to create a practical one, so they can only find another way to train animals to make do. We say that the Indians have practicality, but as a military equipment, it is obviously completely unqualified.
Modern state modern military talks about industrial production and batch equipment. Using creatures like eagles as anti-drone means is OK in important occasions such as airports, but it is too unrealistic to popularize them to all units of the army. The biggest problem is that it is not mass-productive. The time it takes to train an eagle that can intercept drones is difficult to estimate. To equip each unit with such an eagle, the cost and timeliness are unacceptable. Under this premise, nothing else has higher discussion value.
really means that the interception of low-slow small drones like DJI is indeed a very troublesome thing now. It is easy to rely on traditional air defense methods to deal with large-scale integrated drones, but it is quite difficult to deal with such low-slow small drones. This is mainly because the shells of drones like DJI are made of plastic or composite materials, and they are not large in size. The radar reflecting area is quite small; coupled with its extremely slow flight speed, the speed wave gate of Doppler radar will directly filter it out as clutter, and the flight noise of the motor is also difficult to hear under the battlefield clutter, and it is difficult for modern means to detect and intercept at effective distances.
and electronic warfare methods are not effective now for cheap civilian drone like DJI, because military equipment generally does not specifically design this frequency band. In the future, there will be more special reinforcement methods, which will be even more troublesome. From this point of view, birds and low-slow drones have so many similarities, all of which are the radar's reflection surface is small, the flight speed is not fast, and it is difficult to be captured by radar. The targets shot down by the traditional air defense weapon are not a way of thinking that cannot be considered. Indians are only limited by their own abilities and give the simplest and most direct answer.
