Model Airplanes

Psst. Want a hot stock tip? Think ECMs.

Suddenly drones are everywhere and not just the ones your kids keep crashing in the backyard.

Drones are buzzing over crowded public places and creating nightmares for law enforcement and private security personnel.

Days before Super Bowl LIII, the FBI reported that the sky above the Atlanta stadium was being “inundated with an alarming number of drones,” even though the airspace had been designated as no-fly zone.

More than alarmed

FBI agents at the Atlanta field office were more than alarmed: “When we look up into the air and see a drone flying in the air, we have no idea if it’s friendly, or if it’s someone who has nefarious plans and it’s weaponized,” FBI spokesman Kevin Rowson said two days before the big game on Feb. 3, after law enforcement had confiscated half a dozen drones.

The Super Bowl incident came just weeks after drone spottings at two major airports caused flights to be canceled and air traffic controllers to scramble.

UAS, meet ECM

Andy Morabe believes we should be worried. Very worried. Morabe is director of sales and marketing for a company called IXI in Orange County, California. His company has devised an ECM (Electronic Counter Measure), otherwise known as the Drone Killer. Metatron Unmanned Solutions in Charleston wants to market it.

The drone industry is expanding, and anti-drone technology is trying to catch up. IXI’s device, the Drone Killer, which is a registered trademark, works differently than most jamming devices. It sends an electronic signal that

Article source: https://www.wvgazettemail.com/dailymailwv/daily_mail_features/as-drones-grow-so-do-tools-to-take-them-down/article_faa758f1-17f5-5cf3-8267-4daea0a3b283.html

To minimize the disturbing noise caused by loud machines like cars, ships, and airplanes, acoustic engineers use many strategies. One technology, called a Helmholtz cavity, is based on a similar concept to that used in noise-cancelling headphones. Here, engineers build a resonating box that opens to a slit on one side. As air passes over the slit, the box vibrates like a church organ pipe, producing a tone. By adjusting the size and shape of the cavity and its slit, acoustic engineers can tune it to produce a specific tone that — like the headphones — cancels a dominant, irritating sound produced by machinery.

Historically, the process of tuning a Helmholtz resonator was a brute force undertaking involving costly and time-consuming trial and error. Engineers had no other choice but to physically build and test many different geometries experimentally to find an optimal shape for a specific application, especially in an environment of turbulent flow.

Today, however, high-performance computing offers the potential to undertake such tests virtually, making the design process faster and easier.

In a paper just published in the journal Acta Mechanica, Lewin Stein and Jörn Sesterhenn of the TU Berlin describe a new analytical model for sound prediction that could make the design of Helmholtz cavities cheaper and more efficient. The development of the model was facilitated by a dataset produced using direct numerical simulation at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). The analytical model can predict, in a way that is more generally applicable than before, a potential Helmholtz

Article source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190301101757.htm

Curiously, amid the vast expenditure of effort spent in pursuit of MH370, search officials have never adequately grappled with what I see as the case’s central clue: the 18:25 reboot. This, after all, was the event that led directly to the creation of the data that sent investigators on their massive seabed hunt. And it turns out to be awfully weird. So if we want to find a place where the MH370 investigation went off the rails, this should be the first place to look.

Indeed, there are so many reasons to be suspicious of the 18:25 reboot that I find it helpful to divide them into four categories.

1. It Came Out of Nowhere 

In discussing the case, search officials have always treated the existence of MH370’s Inmarsat data as unremarkable. After all, Inmarsat data is something that every plane with a functioning satcom system produces as a matter of course. But the circumstances here are not normal. There’s no reason why even an airline captain, let alone a garden-variety hijacker, would have either the means or the motive to turn this obscure piece of equipment off—and even less so to then turn it back on again. Why would you want to create an electronic signal when up until that point your M.O. has been evasion?

Also weird is the fact that it turned on at exactly the most fortuitous moment. Once the reboot happened, the plane found itself in a highly unusual electrical configuration, with all the communications gear turned off—except for

Article source: http://www.thedrive.com/news/26785/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-5-years-later-the-crucial-clue-all-the-mh370-investigators-overlooked