Does airport radar detect your drone?
- Thread starter james_mav
- Start date
I've been doing some reading & the best I can come up with is "no". ATC radar is likely to ignore tiny speck. If they showed every tiny speck their radar would be overwhelmed.
With the size of the Mavic & how quiet it is then I think most of us are pretty safe from running into problems if we're just smart with how we fly.
Absolutely not.
The vast majority of airports do not have radar.
In addition, very, very difficult to detect something below 400', let alone something that is moving much slower than a car and has no transponder.
Even military air defense radars, which the FAA system is not, would have a very difficult time.
They are too small and too slow.
It would be pure noise/ground clutter.
The vast majority of airports do not have radar.
In addition, very, very difficult to detect something below 400', let alone something that is moving much slower than a car and has no transponder.
Even military air defense radars, which the FAA system is not, would have a very difficult time.
They are too small and too slow.
It would be pure noise/ground clutter.
F6Rider
Well-Known Member
Actually the DEW line Radar systems (no sparrow shall fall) dwell can be dialed down to pick up just about anything. I flew Tech's out to various installations from Elmendorf AFB on the DEW line and they said that with the dwell dialed down they regularly kill birds and can pick up something as small as a baseball. Normally it is not tuned that tight unless they are on alert or for drills. And no, Airport systems are neither that powerful or spec'd that high.
And that makes my point.
I have flown against air defense radars from the US and many other countries.
Nobody is watching that close, or watching anything that slow on a normal day.
F6Rider
Well-Known Member
Correct, normal airport radar's have a 'clutter' filter the screens out the small stuff like birds and Mavic's
Correct, normal airport radar's have a 'clutter' filter the screens out the small stuff like birds and Mavic's
With all due respect, air traffic radars don't have the resolution capability to pick that stuff up.
They rely on "cooperating" aircraft, which is legal speak for having a transponder.
F6Rider
Well-Known Member
The GPS system doesn't know where you are. Your various GPS enabled devices work out where they are based on the various time signals received from the satellites they've discovered. The needle in a haystack reference probably understates the number of devices the system would have to track. I know of 5 that I own that I know of and that number changes based on purchase and disposal so more like looking for a particular grain of sand on a beach.
A link to Garmin's explanation of how GPS works. Garmin | What is GPS?
E92Vancouver
Well-Known Member
No. Your drone locates the GPS satellites. The GPS satellites don't locate you. Your drone is a receiver of GPS signals not a transmitter. When your drone locates the distance it is from 3 satellites (whose exact positions are known) based on time coded transmission, it can then triangulate its position on the earth. It is all trigonometry.
Smaller to medium sized airports (some that don't even have commercial airline traffic but do have larger business AC) that have radar track planes for short distances until they are handed off to or from approach/departure radar. None can track or 'see' birds or small drones but they can detect a flock of birds if the flock is large enough. Birds are usually reported to the tower by inbound or outbound aircraft and when in the vicinity of a runway will be reporter to arriving/departing AC by the tower. There are some airports where the tower doesn't have a view of all the runways and taxiways. A few of these airports (and larger ones) have radar dedicated to tracking planes on the ground but these radars still won't pick up sUAVs just larger moving objects and they are usually giving off a code that tower can track.
Andrew
Andrew
This topic is interesting to me as I just had a possible run in with a marine port authority. Just recently I was flying my Mavic in an area on the north west coast of BC. I was doing some filming of the harbour and marina on a beautiful sunny day. I did a series of different flights that morning until just after noon. The last place I flew was out on the water from my boat at about 30-40 feet altitude while we were fishing. Approximately 20 minutes later a port authority boat arrived near us and seemed to be watching us (at this time I was not flying my drone) but kept his distance. We headed back to the marina and we stopped to check some crab pots on the way and the port authority still followed us. We then went back to the warf as we were done fishing for the day and again the guy was still watching us. At the time I couldn't understand why he was following us. Then a couple hours later it occurred to me that my drone could have been picked up on shipping/boat radar as there is allot of boat traffic in that area or someone possibly reported it. Could boat radar pick up a drone or is it likely I was reported. I'll never know as the guy never came to talk to us, he was just observing.
rightstuffed
Active Member
Probably just letting you know they have an eye on you. Port Authority are usually linked in some way to Homeland Security which in my case (north of Seattle) have nice little boats with 50 cal. mounted. Very large budget group with fingers everywhere. Oops! realized where you from. No worries. They only have rubber band guns up there.
I'd guess that the boat radar is looking for a different kind of return and not discriminating against smaller, slower targets. Boat radar needs to see everything while airport radar is triggering transponders and reading the signal that they send out.
Lapeer20m
Well-Known Member
Airport radar often doesn't even detect airplanes.
Airplane flight information is collected by the aircraft and the transponder sends this info to ATC.
If you listen to the tapes of the radio traffic/phone calls from 9/11 it's obvious that the "missing" aircraft were very difficult to track once they turned off their transponders.
If you are in the mood to listen while this plays in the background, it's a very interesting set of audio recordings from 9/11 and there is much conversation about not being able to locate aircraft without transponders.
Last edited:
Ok, I was just flying a Mavic near but not in class d airspace, about 150' altitude, and two large drones showed up and I think they were watching me. They were operating in class d airspace, so I suspect they were from the airport, possibly enforcing their airspace. They were high, and I could see them pretty well, so I think they were big, they were on station for an hour, before their batteries ran out and they had to leave, so I suspect that they flew directly to my location after some sort of radar detection of my Mavic. Like I said, they were in class d airspace, I was on the edge of class d. Anyone have anything like that happen to them??
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