Drones are on the attack! Well, not really, but like that Mariah Carey song, it seems like they are everywhere nowadays. While drones have been around for decades, military conflicts have vastly accelerated the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles/systems (UAV/UAS, the preferred term for drones) for spying and warfare.But they have an Achilles heel: they need connection. Without it you get this.UAS are fed communications and position information via RF links. The science of severing these links is known as Electronic Warfare (EW). At its basic level, EW seeks to deny RF links via jamming (denying the signal), or, more commonly nowadays, spoofing (creating a fake signal to fool the receiver).An early example of spoofing was documented back in 2011 when Iranian operators fooled an American UAS into thinking it was still in friendly airspace when it was actually in hostile territory.Spoofing used to be rare as it took sophisticated hardware. No more. Advancements in EW and software-defined radios has made "spoofing the new jamming."And the collateral damage from all this EW is the alarming rise in spoofing of commercial flights that extend well beyond the occasional drone sighting.But there is a solution: optical quantum links that remove reliance on vulnerable RF signals (see below).Last Week's Theme: A Modern Horror Story - Part IV
Industry News
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Conferences
Consumer Electronics Show, January 5 - 7, Las Vegas, NV
GeoBuiz Summit, January 13 - 15, Denver, CO
Photonics West, January 25 - 30, San Francisco, CA
ITTM/PTI, January 27 - 28, Long Beach, CA
Ground System Architecture Workshop (GSAW), February 24 - 28, El Segundo, CA
Satellite 2025, March 10 - 14, Washington DC
Space Symposium, April 7 - 10, Colorado Springs, CO
Nemertes [NEXT], April 7 - 10, Nashville, TN
Workshop on Synchronization and Timing Systems (WSTS), May 12 - 15, 2025, Savannah, GA
European Navigation Conference, May 21 - 23, 2025, Wroclaw, Poland
The More You Know...
The rise of anti-UAS EW has greatly advanced the art of jamming and spoofing RF signals, which has in turn seeped into our modern world. They may seem the same, but jamming is analogous to “yelling really loud” while spoofing is more akin to “mimicking somebody else’s voice."Jamming is pretty easy - all you need is a more powerful RF transmitter - but it is also easy to detect.Spoofing, on the other hand, is much more difficult to detect and therefore, more dangerous.But there is a solution: avoiding the broad reach of RF signals altogether by using lasers.Laser/optical links are highly directional, difficult to detect, and can carry a lot of information. As such, they are resistant to jamming.Add entangled photons to that same link to provide provable security that is unspoofable and nearly impossible to detect.The other option: rely on AI to run the drone. But we have seen that movie before.
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