Posted by speckx 1 day ago
They came out at $500
Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.
See the 6-pack: https://www.crowdsupply.com/scale-rf/quadrf#products
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1uso8u1/insanity/
[0] https://www.microcenter.com/product/702590/raspberry-pi-5?rd...
Point still stands that they initially said it would be $50-$100. And its going for $500.
It's a really neat device, but people should realize that it has a very narrow visibility.
The lower the frequency, the bigger the antennae need to be (more or less) so a 2.4gig array would most likely be 2x the size of a 6ghz array.
Since ~2022 and accelerated by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, governments are now behind both private and open source for frontier technology.
The companies that captured government contracts in the last century can’t move fast enough to bring tech into the government and national technology policy and funding is collapsing compared to the private sector
That’s new in history
Open source doesn't mean the end of competition, since we are a competitive species.
I think the future economy is going to be some sort of UBI + large open source projects
I work primarily in sub-GHz radio. Please wake me up when they launch their LoRa version, that would be an instant purchase for me.
Why so bullish on government? The department of motor vehicles is capable of being better, but they aren't.
One big issue with radar is that it has the same problem pilots and human observers do: it struggles to distinguish drones from anything else in the sky (birds, balloons, planes, etc.). This is an active and improving research space, but by and large with radar, when your pilots report a drone, you still don't know how to figure out if it's the typical mis-identification or something real.
And I've read about airport shutdowns in UK and US without a single arrest which is why it keeps happening
So whatever system exists, apparently not good enough
* Pilots are very concerned about life and safety and are heavily exposed to drone “incident” related anecdotes, so they err far on the side of caution with drone sightings. Which is to say a very low percentage of them are real.
* Poorly implemented cUAS systems, especially ones based on passive or active RF locating (radar) can actually make the problem worse: they hallucinate everything into drones, pilots hallucinate everything into drones, and now everything is a drone. This also happens frequently when people try to repurpose military systems (which are usually designed to operate in significantly less crowded environments and trigger at the slightest hint of an issue, due to mostly orthogonal-to-airports threat models people discuss at length on this thread like “dark drones”) into urban use.
This type of array based directionfinding system is cool and it could work as a small ingredient in a drone detection system, but it’s not anywhere near the state of the art in the space and most airports are probably already ahead of this to some extent.
This gizmo is primarily interesting that it's pre-packaged at a price that hobbyists can afford.
Drawing a splodge in roughly the location (not sure if there's range info either? I doubt it if it's passive) overlaid on the video likely won't cut it...
It does become a bit more difficult with consumer grade off the shelf drones because it's built in. Still defeatable by the determined of course.