Man arrested for shooting drone

boing
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You don’t have to fry the optics. Saturating the chip so it doesn’t see you is good enough.

Also, thought for target-tracking. Put a spinning mirror into the optical pathway, make the beam go around as a rotating cone. Sense the reflected signal from the target (use a modulator for the laser, and sharp frequency filter on the sensor, possibly also a notch filter in the optics that matches the laser wavelength to limit effect of ambient light). It will be modulated in a sine-wave with phase depending on the alignment of the tracking cone on the target. The signal then can be fed back to the target-tracking servos. Much like older tracking radars worked.

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I prioritize my right to privacy in my home higher than some guy with a drone’s right to play with it as he pleases. I’m not saying it’s acceptable to go drone hunting in general, but I’d feel quite confident in my right to knock down a drone that’s peeping windows, just as I might chase a peeping tom off my lawn, or hit the asshole with a baseball bat if he refused to stop peeping in the window at me and my family. The solution I previously mentioned wouldn’t do any more damage to property than the inevitable and expected malfunctions that already cause drones to fall out of the sky. Untangle the rotors, and it’s back in action. As far as endangering the public, I’m not the one who chose to put a heavy weighted device with spinning propellers, subject to various failure modes, over an occupied location. I’m just the guy who’s selecting the mode of failure. Still, to concede the point, I realize there’s some room for disagreement. OK, so a passive solution: Lots of tethered helium balloons with dangling monofilament. It’s the drone operator’s fault if he flies over my property and encounters hazardous conditions that result in his drone falling out of the sky. I’m just flying some festive, decorative balloons, ya know, for fun.

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There are bigger issues with aiming a laser at the sky, in my opinion. The powers that be are likely to claim you’re endangering airplanes, with quite a lot of precedence in law. The other downside is that you’re painting a big bright dot on your location, saying ‘here I am, come get me’ to anyone with a camera looking down. The police don’t seem to have any trouble finding and prosecuting kids who shine lasers at airplanes.

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I have wondered about this as a possible defense for non-militarized and/or poor peoples/countries faced with the current air power God Mode that infects western military thinking(i.e. There is no problem for which ‘air strikes’ are not the first solution) What is the cost/effectiveness of thousands or millions of balloons or even small drones infesting an airspace vs. the cost of a high powered fighter bomber?

The same applies to the ocean. Tiny, cheap plastic submersible drones by the millions vs. huge metal aircraft carriers and submarines.

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Doesn’t the 2nd amendment basically not exist in Jersey?

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Really? That’s weird, I wonder how all these guys stay in business.

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Seems kinda sad that most people here are completely missing the issue. The guy used a firearm in an unlawful manner to destroy private property. If someone told you a guy was shooting at a neighbor’s radio controlled car, everyone would be up in arms. But because you are all so fearful and manipulated by the media, you throw common sense out the window and put on your vigilante hats when the word “drone” is in the story. Be ashamed.

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If the neighbor put a camera on his radio controlled car and used it to invade my privacy, I’d be considering ways to block that too. My angle on this is how to block the unlawful use of drones without resorting to unlawful use of firearms, and assuming that the powers that be, who also want to be able to use drones for invasion of privacy, won’t be a bit of help.

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Ah, the intersection on BB between gun-hatred and privacy-love! Who will win?

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Either you are unfamiliar with the facts of this story, or you are willfully ignoring them. The guy was operating the quadrotor to film the construction of a friend’s house. It had nothing to do with the peckerwood with the shotgun, his privacy, or his property.

I can stand on my property all day long and film you in your yard, film your house, film whatever you choose to put into my field of view. It doesn’t give you the right to do anything but go inside and close the blinds. And it most certainly doesn’t give you the right to shoot at my personal property with a shotgun.

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Interesting choice of words. Whether intentionally or not, you’re suggesting that the appropriate response to someone using a gun in this manner is an armed mob response.

I guess “up in legal action” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so easily? :wink:

If I believe someone is spying on me with a remote device of any sort, I would of course approach the matter via the legal system. That said, the notion of someone destroying a remote device out of a belief that it is spying on them is, in my mind, not too very unreasonable. It’s still the wrong course of action, but it’s at least understandable.

For example, if someone slipped a hidden camera into my home or property and I found it, I imagine the thought of destroying it might cross part of my mind. The more intelligent and appropriate response would be to disable it without destroying it and keep it safe for use as evidence - or even leave it alone entirely and let the police find it fully intact - but I could totally understand someone, disgusted and shocked at such an invasion of privacy, destroying the thing immediately.

Of course, a drone in the air is less directly comparable. It’s not inside one’s home, or even necessarily on one’s property, so it’s not nearly as strong of an invasion of privacy. But certainly most homes are not built with a consideration of privacy from the outside above the ground level. People don’t shutter and curtain windows on the second floor of their houses very often, for example. Surely drones flying near a home are not much different than someone climbing a nearby tree with binoculars?

Shooting the drone isn’t the proper response, but it is certainly a somewhat understandable one. The problem is we have so far refused to draft comprehensive drone laws, and establish acceptable limits on their usage that most people can agree to.

For example, how does one handle property lines in mid-air? If a drone flies over a portion of your property, is that a form of trespass? Does your property have “air-space” which can be legally enforced?

If so, how do you physically enforce those boundaries? Small, nimble objects high in the air are difficult to determine the exact position of. Do we require all drones to record telemetry of their flights, which must be made publically available for purposes of legal oversight? Is any other option at all even remotely feasible?

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Maybe, but you don’t have the right to operate an aircraft over your neighbor’s property at altitudes lower than 500 feet (generally). You also don’t have the right to make a damn nuisance all the time, even if you stay on your own property the sounds you make might be leaving it.

I’m not really in favor of discharging firearms over populated areas, but I’m also not in favor of operating low-flying aircraft over them, either. When I was into R/C aircraft we always went way out into the countryside to operate them because we knew they were annoying, and we knew they were dangerous if we lost contact with them or they disintegrated, which happens regularly to toy aircraft because they’re not built with safety in mind. Now that every jackass can order a quadcopter off Amazon it seems that there’s no kind of institutional memory because it’s not a hobby any more. It’s just something that anyone can do by themselves.

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Yeah, location and usage matter a lot here. If the camera was aimed at his house or activities, or if the drone was in his airspace I say more power to him. If nothe is in the wrong.

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I’m figuring a directional antenna with lots of wattage to push the GHz through the drone’s brain. No one can triangulate your position if you’re only using it for a few seconds.

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A lot of the arguments being made in this thread are relevant to the general topic of privacy and personal property laws as applied to flying RC craft, but they miss the facts of this specific case, which are:

  1. The pilot was flying over his friend’s property at the time that the craft was shot, as evidenced by the fact that he was able to recover the craft. If he had been flying over the shooter’s property, the craft would have fallen on the shooter’s property.

  2. The pilot had his friend’s express permission to record.

Even in some very conservative interpretations of privacy laws, this pilot was 100% in the right.

What if the pilot had overflown the neighbor’s airspace? The only relevant court case in the U.S. is US v. Causby. The Supreme Court wrote that:

A landowner “owns at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land,” and invasions of that airspace “are in the same category as invasions of the surface.”

By this standard, an RC craft flying at 30 meters over a two-story home could be argued not to be in violation of the owner’s airspace, since the craft is above the height that the owner can occupy or is using in connection with the land.

If we set aside that argument and stipulate that a privacy violation has occurred, the next question becomes whether it was legally justified to destroy the RC craft with a shotgun. If a photographer trespasses on private property in order to take photographs of a celebrity, and the celebrity responds by detaining the photographer and smashing the camera, is that action legally justified? I think not. If the operator of the craft is violating a law by flying the craft in an unauthorized or unsafe manner, or by recording illegally, the right response is to document the action and notify the police or file a civil law suit.

Finally, I would like to point out that the question of whether the camera was “aimed at his house or his activities” is moot. I have every legal right to stand on the sidewalk and take video of your house, your yard, etc… anything I can see from an area where I have a right to be, I can record. Therefore, if I have a legal right to use the airspace 50 feet above the sidewalk in front of your house, I also have a legal right to record what’s going on in your back yard from that vantage point. This is exactly how paparazzi with telephoto lenses get photos of celebrities by their pools. We may not like it, but that’s how the law is written and interpreted in the United States as of now.

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The problem is that the wattage for an actual damage will be fairly extreme, at least in the common “domestic” scales. There is a reason why directed-energy weapons research did not produce anything really useful yet.

You will want (and have) to go the pulsed power way. Which means a capacitor bank, and high voltage (read: double fun!); think a slightly modded photoflash circuit on steroids.

You can try to go for a knock-off of an old radar magnetron/klystron driver circuit. And stock up with microwave oven magnetrons so you can find where is the sweet spot when the cathode just about does not vaporize. It’s the smallest, lowest thermal-mass parts that you have to worry about at pulsed regime, and the smallest additional heat margin you will have at the already heated filament. The alternative is to make your own magnetron, of course, but that requires quite good vacuum tech. Some people have it at home (look at the DIY vacuum tube videos on youtube, that’s real maker porn), others envy them and occasionally scan the available bargains.

Alternatively, if you can get a radar module from and old MiG, these were rumoured to be able to fry a rabbit at few hundred feet. Too bad I was broke when the Russkies were leaving…

A lower-power way is just jamming the command channel. You can get the actual frequency by a rf analyzer, usually it is located in an ISM band. With a directional-enough antenna you may be able to overpower the control signal, at which moment the drone stops, becomes erratic, or, in case of the more modern ones with onboard GPS, goes back home. Depending on the control protocol, you can get away with pretty low power, and with a directional beam the chance you’ll step on somebody else’s toe (who would then annoy you with FCC) is negligible. You however have to do target tracking, most likely manually. (Todo: mate that tube-shaped yagi with a gun sight and a shoulder-hold adapter, and make a 2.45GHz “bazooka”.)

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One thing I wonder about is the extent of the damage on the craft. What parts were hit, what wires severed, what boards damaged… (But then, I tend to read battleship damage reports for fun…)

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Um, no. Physics 101 fail.

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I’m thinking more along the lines of the hobby drones that the neighbors might have. They’re a lot closer, and I’d only have to interrupt the link for a few seconds while it tumbled to the ground.

The big, commercial/government drones are too powerful and distant for me to deal with; I only know enough about electronics to get myself in trouble. I’d wind up inadvertantly pulling an “Ocean’s Eleven” on my neighborhood, and I doubt that I could keep that one under my hat.

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