maybe aliens sell their stuff on ebay

That's illegal to export how ? I have 3 UAVs myself and in fact am going to use one to escort transports.
My friend is focusing on hexacopters with infrared, laser, nightvision and heat detection.

Not sure why a RC plane (ok it's quite tech) is illegal. Anyways that news story reeks of coops and dirty US intel involvement getting this Filipino to the US to get some information out of him.

Most likely the plans were hacked from a defense contractors server and built in China as toys. Guess it will take another few months before the US gov realizes that...

I'll bet it was one that was sold by a soldier, or captured from one. The guy still has stuff for sale on Ebay. If these things are so advanced, they should put a locator on them. $100 R C planes have them.

Did I mention that the seller was a gay child abuser? That will get this thread some hits.

I'm intrigued at how this fell under the jurisdiction of US Homeland Security...the guy was in the Philippines, which last I checked was a sovereign nation. I can understand if he was exporting the drone from the US, but he wasn't. Also the fact that he mysteriously shows up in LA to conveniently be arrested just reeks of spec-ops. Seems to me like the the DHS is crossing boundaries that it shouldn't be (like that's really a big surprise.) Regardless of how "illegal" this is in the US, I don't see any reason for Homeland Security to have the authority to extradite and convict a foreign national for selling an overpriced RC plane on eBay.

Originally posted by no special characters
Not sure why a RC plane (ok it's quite tech) is illegal.

I wasn't sure about that either so I read the article. It says "full waypoint capability" is what makes it illegal. Actually I don't think it would be that hard to hook a $99 cell phone up to an RC plane and get the plane to follow waypoints in the phone's GPS. The article doesn't say whether you can do that yourself or not, it just says you can't sell it.

I guess I'm ignorant, because I don't understand what the big deal is with an RC plane following some waypoints.

Originally posted by earthdude
I was told that civilian GPS is purposly off by a few feet to keep military GPS on top for targeting.

I think you're probably thinking of this:

Initially, the highest quality signal was reserved for military use, and the signal available for civilian use was intentionally degraded ("Selective Availability", SA). This changed with President Bill Clinton ordering Selective Availability to be turned off at midnight May 1, 2000, improving the precision of civilian GPS from 100 meters (about 300 feet) to 20 meters (about 65 feet)....As of 2006, even low-cost units commonly include Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) receivers.

The WAAS gets accuracy to within about 25 feet. The military may have even more advanced augmentation systems, I don't know what accuracy they can attain.

Maybe there is a chip, or software in this toy plane that is the thing they want to keep from the public. It is not really a weapon, but I bet it could be weaponized.

That plane doesn't look big enough to fly above 11 miles high. If it was, I could understand a restriction like this:

All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn)[48] are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required. These limits attempt to prevent use of a receiver in a ballistic missile.

At least that one I understand.

GPS is really not all that great of a guidance system, to be honest. Inertial Navigation Systems based around laser ring gyros are far better (though only as good as the methods used to calibrate them). Though for target designation, laser designation is pretty much as good as it gets. A lot of munitions can feed directly from the launch vehicle's designation systems. LRGINS just needs to know how far away it is and in what direction - and over such short time frames, it can be as accurate as a laser guided munition. The only time you need to start getting into more complex navigational issues is when you want the missile/plane/etc to know -where- it actually is. In which case - it's all relative to the accuracy of the data.

INS systems are calibrated each time the aircraft leaves its hangar/port/etc - every location where a vehicle is parked is marked by a sequence of numbers that is plugged into the INS. Older systems were very accurate for several hours after that point in time - however, they begin to decay in accuracy exponentially. This was offset by the use of GPS to provide calibration updates - but GPS is horribly unreliable at altitude. I'm not quite sure how newer systems have been improved.

Honestly, though - GPS is pretty useless as a flight navigational instrument in UAVs. The best possible navigational system would be a good INS with an accurate calibration marker used to reference a digital collision model. Depending upon the system used, and the accuracy of the computerized model, you could have a completely autonomous drone capable of flying for hundreds of miles and landing to within an inch of where it thought it was.

But using some infra-red range finding equipment to improve survivability in regions where the computer's map is "for illustrative purposes, only" would be advisable.

Because, really, if you want to build a UAV that you can program to fly into buildings - you'll need much better than your phone's GPS or a Garmin to do it. Though I suppose you could just launch several and hope the mean deviation between them ensures a hit.

But at that point - you may as well go the extra mile to develop the more elaborate system that all but guarantees a hit, as it will run you about the same in costs and be cheaper in the long run if you decide to target more buildings.

with a lap top and a box of tricks from maplins and a GPS and camera.
and some other simple stuff and a small plane.
any one can build a remote plane.
that you fill with bombs.
then send it to a target.
use the camera and dive bomb some one.
it would be put down as a crash landing.
you should add some bones from a grave.
This is what They do!