Ukraine Found a Way to Beat Russia's Unjammable Drones. It Doesn't Work Anymore.
Ukrainian forces used to follow fiber-optic cables back to Russian drone operators. Now there are too many cables to follow.
Fiber-optic first-person-view drones are jam-proof. Sending and receiving signals along millimeters-thick but miles-long optical fibers, these FPV drones are impervious to the radio interference that can ground wireless FPV drones.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to defeat a fiber-optic drone. Ukrainian forces have tracked Russian operators by spotting, in bright sunlight, the reflective fibers spooling out behind a drone—and then following the fibers back to the Russians’ base, potentially kilometers away.
But now there are so many old drone fibers littering the busiest battlefields that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to trace them back to an active drone base.
Fire will melt the existing cables, making new ones stand out better.