In addition to being totally cool gadgets for the tech geeks among us, drones are useful tools for many industries. With the ability to carry a wide variety of payloads, they are rapidly becoming mission critical with many applications including agricultural and mine surveying and mapping, disaster and humanitarian response, construction site inspection and crime investigation.
But what about when drones fall into the hands of those with darker motives? Many drone technology developers are working on products to counter this threat, such as those demonstrated by Airspace in March of last year or those being used at this year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. It’s one thing to create a drone-catching drone to mitigate threats, but if the payload is an explosive or biochemical agent, it’s imperative that drone threat is grounded safely.
One of the leaders in detection and countermeasure enforcement of anti drone technology, DroneShield, has released product that addresses this concern – and it’s now available for military purchase. The latest in its series of products to have acquired a NATO Stock Number is its DroneGun MKII.
This 13-digit numeric code from NATO is a stamped approval of the DroneGun MKII as a standardised item of supply which is recognised by all NATO countries. This will allow any of the 29 NATO militaries to purchase DroneGun MKII on a military catalog basis. According to DroneShield, the number was assigned as a result of a request issued by the United States Department of Defense.
The DroneGun MKII is a drone jammer providing a safe countermeasure against a wide range of drone models, allowing a controlled management of drone payloads such as explosives or biochemical agents. It ensures the safe landing and retrieval of dangerous payloads, with affected drones commonly executing a controlled vertical landing directly beneath their current location, or returning to their home point, which also assists in discovering the location of the operator.
With it’s portable rifle-like design and ability to immediately jam video transmission to the drone operator, it does indeed have appeal to the military market. DroneGun can operate in temperatures from -10 degrees to 55 degrees Celcius, has a 2km range and operates at either 2.38Ghz-2.483Ghz or 5.725Ghz-5.825Ghz. You can check the rest of the tech specs here.
DroneShield possesses several highly effective, portable drone countermeasure products to combat a wide range of drone models. Earlier this month, DroneShield launched RadarZero, a compact drone detection radar product that is now fully commercialised and available for purchase. DroneShield launches compact and portable RadarZero for drone detection. RadarZero complements DroneShield’s existing longer-range RadarOne product. The company is offering it both as a standalone product and as part of the DroneSentinel drone detection and DroneSentry drone detection and mitigation platforms.