Technology

Military tech companies will be perfectly fine. They typically have 10+ year contracts, and military equipment has a huge price margin in exchange for being reliable and field-serviceable, and the main disadvantage of DIY radar is reliability (unless you also recruit the guy who built it into the army).

It will probably impact civilian market more, where the same companies will try to sell you an unnecessarily hardened machined aluminium box full of cheap Chinese electronics, camo painted for an additional ten thousand bucks.

Their next commercial offering might just be cheaper.

My German U-boat neighbors are seething right now.

You're lucky to have that. My radar has ads.

There are companies that offer RaaS, basically radar rentals.

Source: my company had a customer who rented a weather radar for a year to do a study on weather patterns in South America

So, one of the really interesting things to me about this approach is that it offers the same asymmetric value proposition that cheap attack drones do to modern pre-drone IADS.

That is: this is a platform that costs 10-15k, and an AGM-88 of modern manufacture costs almost 900k, and a Kh-31 costs about 550k - and, just as importantly, both require a long time to manufacture. So, you could theoretically make a moderately large distributed array sprinkled over a few square kilometers, and even if they’re ALL turned on, it quickly becomes logistically infeasible to knock them all out without spending a silly quantity on antirad munitions, as well as massively attriting your stocks of antirad munitions. And if you turn like 10-25% of them on at a time and cycle through your array, the problem becomes even harder for the attacker. And if you have some sort of process or mechanism - like, oh I don’t know, figuring out how to do light aerial transport with cargo drones, or even figuring out how to mount these distributed array nodes on the drones themselves, and some sort of lightweight tether for providing power - the problem becomes a MASSIVE pain in the ass for an adversary (especially that last idea, which introduces z-axis and immediate maneuverability, such that the array could feasibly detect and altogether avoid an incoming antirad munition).

And that’s the paradigm of modern warfare - not just drones, but also networked and attritable systems that maintain functionality when elements are taken offline

This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.

Hmm, considering how cheap these are to make (relatively speaking) could it make a good decoy? Basically set a bunch of these up in random places away from anything important with remote on switches and when missiles start flying power them up one at a time. They're more expensive than the anti-missile drones (those are supposedly about $1000 a piece) but they might be more effective in their own way.

Honestly if I have fun building it then I'll spend 80 to build my own but if I need it right now then I'll probably buy a ready made one. It's basically the difference between my home pc and the mac I use for office work.

Just do like Musk did and only use cameras. It'll be fiiiineeee.

This doesn't have any practical application in Ukraine.

Ukraine detects FPV drones with numerous distributed and networked microphone/acoustic sensors. You're not going to get any cheaper than a used phone paired with a $2 USB solar panel.

The larger Shahed/Geran and above stuff isn't limited by radar detection. What they need are cheap interceptors to deal with swarm attacks.

That should never be a reason not to share open source knowledge!

This is, to be fair, mentioned in the article. Cool project nonetheless!

I bet more than one billionaire has them on their doomsday compounds. Who am I kidding, they buy the new $250k system.

I mean. I like cool electronic gadgets. It’d probably be fun to play with.

This would be a lot of fun for those of us who like messing with radios and antennas

https://reticulum.network/

This is a phased array radar system, which is significantly different than the mechanical radars used by boats/ships. A phased array system typically supports near real time tracking of multiple targets since the radar signals are controlled through solid state beam steering.

Mechanical radars like those on boats can only update targets as quickly as the antenna rotates, which can be as slow as 20 RPM for some consumer brands. They are very different beasts. Comparing the two is like comparing a car to a train…