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Comment by igorramazanov

16 hours ago

That stuff is good for drone warfare, mesh networks already been used in Ukraine

E.g. drones geographically organize themselves into a chain with each of them serving as a mesh-network node, then each of them, including the tip of a chain, can be controlled by operators, and the whole setup is a closed network which works without requiring Internet access

10 comments

igorramazanov

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po1nt  16 hours ago

The bandwidth of LoRa networks is really low. Anything beyond a environment sensors is stretching the design, especially on mesh networks.

Meshing two digit number of drones on a military grade reliability is a real uphill battle with chirp based protocols, as the high ToA reaches congestion fast.

ninjagoo  16 hours ago

> That stuff is good for drone warfare

> each of them serving as a mesh-network node

might have worked for a bit in the past, but is easily disrupted by jammers, and forced a switch to fiber-optic in-theater. People have learned from that and don't bother with radio anymore, even in new theaters.

  • esseph  12 hours ago

    Not everything is fiber optic.

    Fiber optic tethers limit range and target conditions. You can't go into a forest or even an urban canyon, you basically need to run the drone along roads and fields. And you have to drag it with you, which reduces what you can carry. The fiber itself is very light weight and has a habit of getting sucked up into the props on quadcopters.

    There's a lot of frequency hopping and chirp systems being used now, with a mix between analog radios mostly for FPV and digital radios or Starlink for larger ISR drones or larger gliders. Digital still gets used a lot for FPV because of how readily available it is, but good drone FPV pilots want the lower latency of analog and will take it if they can get it.

    • KaiserPro  4 hours ago

      > which reduces what you can carry.

      the flip side of that is that your operator can be miles away, and using repeaters, hundreds of miles away. As the operator is the difficult to replace part, its a fair tradeoff.

      Frequency hopping is nice, as is spread spectrum but its still easily detectable, as is the operator.

KaiserPro  4 hours ago

> drones geographically organize themselves into a chain with each of them serving as a mesh-network node,

And giving away their location. Radio is prettymuch dead for drones.