The idea of daisy-chaining 50 Shaheds with 1km tethers for a 50km unjammable FPV relay chain is clever in concept, but super impractical in reality.
Shaheds are fast (~150-180 km/h), fixed-wing, one-w...
A 0.25mm fibre optics tether isn't exactly "heavy cables". The drag would be about 4N at 150km/h or 8N at 200km/h. That's less than a kg equivalent.
I don't think you can just throw a tether at a Shahed drone to achieve this but the concept wouldn't make the drones much more expensive but infinitely more effective.
The weight of the tether would be minimal. FPV drones are used with 50km spools. In my concept you could go down to 100m. That weighs nothing and hardly drags.
To avoid tangling, you can have the forward tether in one tube at the tip and the backward tether in a different tube at the tail. These tubes could control where the tether is relative to the drone engine and the other tether to avoid tangling.
The chain would be self-organizing. Each drone only needs to keep a rough relative position to its leader. Even if frequent corrections reduce range, this is a solved problem.
So this concept uses RF as a fall-back, too but the long chain would add significant resistance to RF jamming.
The linked events reference the tethered FPV units, too. Thanks for replying anyway.
I don't think you can just throw a tether at a Shahed drone to achieve this but the concept wouldn't make the drones much more expensive but infinitely more effective.
The weight of the tether would be minimal. FPV drones are used with 50km spools. In my concept you could go down to 100m. That weighs nothing and hardly drags.
To avoid tangling, you can have the forward tether in one tube at the tip and the backward tether in a different tube at the tail. These tubes could control where the tether is relative to the drone engine and the other tether to avoid tangling.
The chain would be self-organizing. Each drone only needs to keep a rough relative position to its leader. Even if frequent corrections reduce range, this is a solved problem.
So this concept uses RF as a fall-back, too but the long chain would add significant resistance to RF jamming.
The linked events reference the tethered FPV units, too. Thanks for replying anyway.
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