A birds nest incorporating fiber optic cableis a striking sign of how much debris from fiber-guided FPVs now litters the landscape of Ukraine.
Other images showfields glittering with fiberslike spiderwebs where dozens of drones have passed overhead.Meanwhile social media fills with hide-and-seek videos as Ukrainian drone pilots use their new ability to go inside buildings to hunt Russian vehicles.The non-toxic fibers may not harm birds, but they signal extreme danger to humans.
Fiber drone summer is starting.Fiber EvolutionMost FPV attack drones rely on a radio link to the operator, which can be an Achilles heel.
Fly too low, or behind a hill and the connection may be lost.
More commonly though, FPVs are lost to jamming,up to 75% of them.
Anecdotally as many of the losses are friendly fire rather than enemy electronic warfare.
Jammers give imperfect protection against FPVs, but many rely on them.The very first fiber drones only had a range of a few kilometers, but this has steadily increased.
Drones with 10-15 km of cable are now common.
Much greater ranges are possible.
Ukrainian troops recently claimed to have hit targets with afiber drone from 42 kilometers away.
A Russian video shows aclaimed 50-kilometer spoolof fiber weighing less than 4 kilos too big for many FPVs, but suitable for larger models with a reduced bombload.
Ranges are likely to increase and weights decrease with better fiber.Fiber FPVs areincreasingly used for ambush attacksin which the drone lands and waits for a target.
Previously in such attacks the ambusher lay dormant to save batteries, waiting for a signal from a scout drone that a target was approaching.
But because fiber drones require less power to maintain communication over long range, they can lurk by a track or road for an extended period.The Russians have recently shown off a more advanced version of this concept, a small tracked robot with a fiber connectionacting as carrier for a fiber FPV.
There are no signs that this has been used in action yet, but it could significantly extend both the reach and loiter time for FPV attacks.
Uncrewed vehicles with more FPVs could stage miniature Operation Spiderweb attacks of their own.Countering Fiber DronesAt present there are no good countermeasures against fiber drones.Netting may catch a drone before it reaches its target, but the smallest gap can be fatal as this video of a droneslipping through Russian anti-FPV nettingshows..
The videos above show that no building is secure against fiber drones unless all the possible entry points are covered.People often suggest tracking the fiber cable back to the operator, but as the images of fields covered in cables show, this is now virtually impossible.Cutting the cable is another common suggestion, and one video is claimedto show a quadcopter cutting an FPV control fiberwith its rotor blades (see below).
However, it is not clear that this is what the video actually shows, and in any case, this seems to have been a one-off.
Detecting a fiber drone as it comes in at high speed, getting behind it, locating the cable and cutting it are all challenging.Quite likely we will start to see dogfights between fiber FPVs and interceptors.
These engagements will need to be automated because of the speeds involved.The numbers of fiber drones on both sides are increasing fast, and work on counters continues.
Nobody yet knows how long the fiber drone summer will last, or what could bring it to an end.Source: Forbes