Battelle DroneDefender – This is how you shoot drones out of the sky – Video
Gone are the days when your neighbor was spying on your 1968 Mustang. The time to get rid of that annoying buzz you keep hearing on late summer evenings has come. And no, shooting off the stupid thing with a gun is not what we’re talking about. How about a smooth, portable, accurate and rapid-to-use gizmo that will stop drones from flying without even harming them?
We know some of you fine people have had close encounters with the sometimes annoying quadcopters and wished you could somehow stop them from spying on you. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, that is how they call these flying cameras that make you feel a lot like in George Orwell’s 1984 famous novel. But we may have found the right thing for you.
Meet Battelle’s DroneDefender, a gun that looks more like a classic television antenna you strap to your arm. The evil contraption uses radio control frequency disruption technologies to stop drones safely in the air before they can pose a threat to military or civilian safety – the world’s largest nonprofit research and development organization tells us.
Cheap and effective
Not only can you have one such device but apparently it also is a quite cheap, easy-to-use, lightweight, point-and-shoot system too. The only setback is that you need to be at a maximum 400-meter (1,312-foot) distance from the flying sorcery to make sure the gizmo is effective.
“This is just the kind of tool we need to safely counter a drone threat,” says Dan Stamm, the senior researcher who led the project. “The DroneDefender can help protect us from those who may wish to do us harm.”
Spec-wise, we’re looking at an innovative device with a cold start time of under 0.1 seconds and operating time of five hours continuously. It weighs less than 10 pounds (4.5 kg), depending on how it is configured.
But why should we trust that these people actually know what they’re doing? Well, they claim the research team that developed the DroneDefender drew from their own extensive military backgrounds, as well as the company’s technology expertise and 70-year history.
As if the mere fact it exists weren’t enough, because it is designed to repel unwanted UAVs’ attention without doing damage, this contraption can also be used stateside as well as abroad. Heck, you can even get one specially created for challenging environmental conditions.
As we mentioned above, this bad boy is supposedly cheap, but since the company making it has not yet announced any price, we’re going to have to wait and see what inexpensive really means. Meanwhile, you can check the thing “at work” in the video below.