Godlike Productions - Reply to Thread

Users Online Now: 1,652 (Who's On?)	Visitors Today: 812,518
Pageviews Today: 1,393,589	Threads Today: 540	Posts Today: 9,996
03:34 PM

REPLY TO THREAD

Subject How Iran took control of the RQ-170 DRONE

User Name

Font color: Font:

In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss and no more than 50% of the source material, provide a link back to the original article and provide your original comments / criticism in your post with the article.

Original Message When the drone is in the air it is controlled via a satellite link from a remote operating station. But during start and landing the drone is piloted via line-of-sight radio by an operator near the start or landing field. This is necessary because the remote satellite link has a delay of several hundred milliseconds which is just too much latency to correct wind sheer and other problems during takeoff and landing.

What the Iranians seem to have done is to take over the drone's line-of-sight control. This after electronically disrupting its satellite link. Disrupting the satellite link alone would not be enough as the drone would then have followed some preprogrammed action like simply flying back to where it came from. With the line-of-sight control active a satellite link disruption would not lead to a preprogrammed abort.

We can reasonably assume that the Iranians have some station near Kandahar Airport that is listening to all military radio traffic there. They had four years to analyze the radio signaling between the ground operator and such drones. Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code. - [link to hamsayeh.net]

Pictures (click to insert)





\| Next Page >>