Radio Hill Climbs New Height in Anti-Drone Tech for Army

An Oregon-based firm is helping the U.S. Army fight ISIS drones. Portland company Radio Hill Technologies inked a deal last week with the army’s Rapid Equipping Force to immediately deliver an unnamed quantity of its Block 3 Dronebuster hand-held counter-drone detection and jamming systems. The agreement will allow the army to deploy drone jammers in places like Syria and Afghanistan where ISIS-led drone attacks are a clear and present danger to soldiers.

The device can detect incoming RF signals which allow it to find drones in low-visibility conditions and inform the user of the drone’s signal strength. Weighing in at just five pounds, Dronebuster jams consumer and modified UAV radios across ISM, UHF HAM and GPS bandwidths, as well as standard 2.45 and 5.8 MHz interruption frequencies. The company’s spec sheet states the device’s “redesigned antenna cluster and amplification network provide directional jamming over longer ranges than any other man-portable system.”

“It has been a lot of work getting the system certified for deployment,” said Radio Hill CTO Bryan Sydnor. “However, we are thrilled to partner with the Army to get this easy-to-use capability in the hands of our warfighters.”

Due to consumer-facing regulations, Radio Hill is only selling Dronebuster to defense and federal agencies.

As anti-drone (or drone mitigation) devices continue to pop up on the market, so do the best product names. Radio Hill’s Dronebuster is not the only one carrying the catchy name (Who ya gonna call-right?).

Last year, California-based Flex Force unveiled another anti-drone gun also dubbed Dronebuster. The device exploits weaknesses in a UAV’s internal protocols themselves, allowing a user to command a captured drone to fly back to its base or simply land wherever it is. This would allow a police force to gather data from a downed drone to locate its errant owner.

Military agencies are all abuzz about anti-drone solutions. In February, Liteye, a major counter-drone company partnered  with Tribalco, a “mission-critical” IT/telecommunications service provider, to deliver the Anti-UAV Defense System (AUDS) to U.S. military agencies. Dubbed “the world’s first fully integrated detect-track-disrupt-defeat” drone defense system, AUDS took flight last year as a consortium that includes Liteye, Gryphon Sensors and Sensofusion through an FAA Cooperative Research and Development Agreement.