00:50:30 · Ty Morse
[00:50:30] S1: Yeah. I remember, I think I was at Olaf's house probably three or four months ago, and I was talking with one of the people that works at Neros, and he mentioned that when you guys were out on some, like, testing thing, I don't know if it was in, like, Hawaii with with the military, they had a, like, RF or, you know, a a jammer. And you guys flew a drone right by a jammer, and they didn't even pick it up. What's it been like when you kinda run into the situation where the military or some other organization thinks that they have capability to, you know, detect or or jam drones, and then they realize like, oh shit, we don't actually have that?
00:51:06 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
[00:51:06] S0: We've done this a bunch of times with the US military. Yeah. We we've defeated... On on first pass, we've defeated, like, every single jammer that the US military has put up put us up against. And there's a lot of nuance in in, like, how you do testing with jammers, but I think a really good example of this was in Alaska with a event where we were flying about seven kilometers away from the jam... Our ground station was 77 kilometers away from the ground station, and so, you know, the the the advantage at that point is really with the jammer, not with the the drone system. The soldiers, they knew our the frequencies we were operating on. They'd we'd already done a bunch of testing runs and they collected data, so this was not a realistic scenario. It was so in favor of the jamming team, and so we flew seven kilometers over to the jammer, and then just hovered in front of them for like ten minutes, you know, letting them adjust their settings, seeing if they could if they could degrade our link to the point where, you know, they would actually take us out of the sky. After ten minutes, they eventually with five jammers going at once, they got to essentially taking out one of our control links. We have two. So the drone is still operating, but they had they had degraded about half. In a real world scenario, you know, that would... That it just... Our drone would have obviously won there. Right? Like, we wouldn't have hovered. We would just have come in and hit the target. [00:52:44] S1: It would've taken, like, a few seconds.
00:52:44 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:52:44] S1: It would've taken, like, a few seconds. [00:52:46] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And we expected this, so we kind of played a a bit of a prank on the soldiers. We strapped a jar of Smucker's strawberry jam to our drone as the payload. And so we were... Had radio to to them, and after, you know, a few minutes hovering there, they were... We we we started, like, we asked them on the radio, like, hey, can you guys see the payload? And they're like, yep, we see you have a payload. And they're like, no, can you see what the payload is? And then they sent a guy with a backpack jammer, cause they wanted to get this backpack jammer, you know, as close to the drone as possible. They got the backpack jammer within 15 feet of our drone, and then the soldier carrying that saw the Smucker's jam, And and yeah, they were like, alright, well, the the the, you know, the Jammer has been defeated by the Jam. So... But going back to your your your point of like, what is that like? It is actually quite worrying for the soldiers, understandably. Right? Because this is expense... Their equipment is... It's expensive equipment. [00:54:01] S1: Might be like hundreds of thousands or
00:54:01 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:54:01] S1: Might be like hundreds of thousands or [00:54:03] S0: millions of dollars.... Combined millions of dollars, stuff that they've been told would protect them from a threat like this, and then totally falls flat on its face. So they were, you know, that... You know, it was a funny funny joke, but actually they were pretty unhappy at the end of this just because it was like realizing how underprepared, like, you know, we we are collectively for a scenario where small drones are the, you know, one of the biggest threats. So I think it's important that we continue to do a lot of testing against the counter UAS systems that exist in America because the trend so far has been that we we dominate and that's actually a bad thing because our, you know, our drone technology has a lot of similarities to adversary drone technology, so we're we're clearly not ready for for a war. [00:55:06] S1: Are you trying to help the US military kind of prepare for that sort of eventuality where there are, you know, you you don't have ten minutes to hover? And like, how do you how do you help them with that?
00:55:06 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:55:06] S1: Are you trying to help the US military kind of prepare for that sort of eventuality where there are, you know, you you don't have ten minutes to hover? And like, how do you how do you help them with that? [00:55:17] S0: It's just I think making more opportunity... Like both us and the government making more opportunities available to each other to go out and do testing like this, and then talking about why, you know, why is the jamming not working, what are the sort of nuances of our radios that make that possible. I will say that the regulatory environment in America is a big reason why we're in this position now. We have such strict controls over the spectrum that even military jamming equipment has been largely designed around consumer frequencies, basically just making this assumption that, you know, in a time of war, adversarial drones are gonna be using consumer frequencies and consumer radios. And how did that happen? [00:56:06] S1: Like wouldn't wouldn't someone at some point be like this doesn't make sense? [00:56:10] S0: You would think. It's just so hard to actually go and get approval, like range approval to turn on a jammer or a drone working on non standard frequencies. So even for the Department of War, it's a huge limitation, you know, and I I get it, like, the the FCC and the FAA don't want airplanes falling out of the sky and and, you know, telling... Telecommunications not working, etcetera, but... [00:56:34] S1: But if you if you can't test for it, then you can't actually prepare for the real
00:56:34 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:56:34] S1: But if you if you can't test for it, then you can't actually prepare for the real [00:56:37] S0: It's world really hard to test these systems America right now. And and there are folks in the government who recognize this and are trying to figure out how to get this changed, but it's it's a huge hurdle for any, like, small company that wants to do this. I actually believe that America has incredible electronic warfare capability at the super high end of the spectrum. You know, we, like, flew over Venezuela and turned off all the lights. Right? That's insane. And and, you know, like, f 18 Growlers is a amazingly capable product. But on the sort of low cost and... I think that's where we we aren't very good. But that's the stuff that will get widely distributed to our war fighters, and that's why going back to the testing event, that's why it's scary for for the soldiers to see that result of the drone just dominating the jammer. So it sort of follows the trend of FPV drones themselves, like America didn't invest heavily into the high quantity, low cost systems. We are far behind in the production and technology of those systems. It's not just the drones, it's also the counter drones. So I believe there's a huge gap in the, yeah, the widely distributed counter UAS space. [00:57:55] S1: Do you have any other stories that are similar to the Alaska experience where there was almost like an oh shit moment with the military, where you were able to kind of show them how much further along or how how much their capabilities didn't work?