Here's the anti-drone gun of your Rambo fantasies
The Australian-listed company DroneShield has given the internet a closer look at its new portable anti-drone gun or "tactical drone jammer." If you want to look like a real "Dude" as you knock pesky drones out of the sky, this is it.
Designed as a countermeasure against drones flying where they shouldn't, the DroneGun claims it won't smash the unmanned aircraft to the ground. Instead, according to the product's brochure, it aims to implement a vertical landing or return the drone to its starting point.
The almost six kilogram (13.2 pound) DroneGun can apparently do this at a range of up to two kilometres (1.2 miles), using a variety of jammer measures. Those measures include jamming 2.4 gigahertz and 5.8 gigahertz frequency bands, as well as GPS and GLONASS (the Russian satellite navigation system) jamming. It has a battery run time of two hours.
The DroneGun is part of DroneShield's range of anti-drone technologies, although it's one of the few to actively render drones inoperable.
Previously, the company focused on offering drone detection via acoustic sensing. It has long and short range products that can hear a drone and convey that information to security in real-time.
"We record the noises in a particular area, remove the background noise through our patent technology, and we can identify if it's a drone and what sort," DroneShield CEO James Walker told Mashable in April.
The DroneGun is certainly not the only such product being developed. There's Battelle's DroneDefender, which promised to use radio control frequency disruption to jam a drone and bring it to the ground, as well as OpenWorks Engineering's SkyWall that captures drones in a net.
These anti-drone measures still have a way to go before they're freely available to the general public. As DroneShield's site notes, DroneGun may not be used or offered for sale in the U.S., other than to the government and its agencies.
That's because the Federal Communications Commission "prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment."
In Australia, it's also illegal for civilians to use technologies that jam mobile phone signals and GPS.
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
