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That's... not strictly true, at least for lower tiers of "drone signals". You can (if you have a ton of money, and are a US citizen, and don't mind getting probed) just buy a commercial 'drone signal tracker' box and antenna kit. My guess is that the smarter ones do a lot of complex FPGA-based TDMA-like analysis work, but there's probably a few cheaper-tier ones that are just boxes stuffed full of SDRs. There are even STC'd variants for shoving into aircraft, though guessing from first principles I doubt they're very good. DJI even makes one for its specific protocol...
Which is the limiting factor: decoding traditional analog control signals doesn't tell you much about DJI's various protocols, which don't tell you about MAVLink, which doesn't tell you about some schmuck hackadayer's DIY version. Protocols are (notoriously) easy to make, and the .mil versions of a drone don't even have to use the same frequency bands as cOTS drones. Then we can throw in encryption, and you're really screwed. The only really universal response to radio control signals is triangulation, and a) that doesn't tell you much more than 'something was here' and b) are the sort of technology that has good solutions old enough to vote.
Blocking the more specialized drones that don't use radio signals gets a lot more complicated. AFAIK, we haven't seen any fiber cable drones in the continental United States, or purely-camera-driven drones... but it's a matter of when, not if.
Oh, I think it's much worse than that. I'd like to be in a world where the meta favors some type of tightly-targeted EMI weapon that burns out drone motor controllers -- that would still be costly to legitimate drones if misused, but mostly just drones. I don't think we live in that world, though.
Consider what a meta where physical interception with a net by a 300kph low-cost counter-drone looks like, includes, and could in the hands of a bad actor to non-drone known targets, including non-drone targets that are not considered 'critical infrastructure' but would cause tens, hundreds, or thousands of deaths if attacked. And that's still an optimistic case!
Specifically, until 2000, GPS degradation was based on an additional psuedorandom delay... that had been turned off over short periods before during periods of military (during the Persian Gulf War) or civil (disaster response) need, and enough had been learned during those temporary turn-off periods that differential GPS had already made it possible to eliminate the noise factor for most applications, and both government and nongovernment orgs were pushing for an implementation. It was still a good thing that Clinton took out SA, but it's also something that was reaching the end of its usefulness as a technology already. The government implementation of dGPS/WAAS meant those higher-quality fixes remained under gov control that could be turned off with a flick of a switch if needed...
Until GLONASS was in good working order in 2011, and dual (or triple-) single-chip GPS/GLONASS/Beidou chips became the new standard (2015?). Now, there's really no way to degrade GPS signal short of just jamming it.
Tbf, the vast majority of the public airports are tiny, pretty irrelevant, and operate using local contractors for pretty much everything; almost all of the private ones are even more irrelevant to the calculus. To be less fair, you aren't defending the big international airports with one person, or even one person per shift.
Eh... anyone can try to sue over anything, but there's not really a lot of grounding for that case here. At least from people in this field, I've seen more concerns about second- or third-party harm (eg, taking down a drone and it landing one someone else).
At least pre-SAFER SKIES, one of the biggest issues was not the FAA or DHS, but FCC -- they really don't like anything even remotely close to signal jamming or devices that can accidentally jam stuff. For a while, the only way the FCC was letting even tests of long-distance drone signal jamming tech happen involved one of their designees standing directly behind the person holding the button down, in person. That's starting to change, but not quickly, and I'm skeptical that it can change as quickly as technology will in response. Dunno if SAFER SKIES changed that, though.
IMO one of the few sane solutions for legitimate drone usage would be locking down the controllers somewhat. Some drone analog of ADS-B (I hear that actual ADS-B won't take kindly to 1000 drones in line-of-sight), combined with (real-time?) geofencing rules might at least be practical. "Won't fly without GPS fix. Won't fly where it's not supposed to. Sends location telemetry in real-time." is at least the right direction.
I think the only "EMI" weapon that even remotely fits the bill is laser weapons hitting drone batteries or other weak parts. "Some things in this
roomdrone don't react well tobulletsdirected energy". I won't be surprised if a decade from now semi-autonomous anti-drone laser SHORAD is openly fielded in a few places. Maybe even not military ones.EDIT: It's worth noting that large airports nationwide have full-time teams scaring birds away from airports as aviation hazards. Would an equivalent size anti-drone team even get noticed in the noise?
Geofencing is practical with participating manufacturers and users; you could use it to keep every fool who just got back from Best Buy with a new drone from flying it over the nearby airport, military base, whatever. It doesn't do anything against intentional bad actors, because the geofencing can be removed (as it often was when DJI was doing it) or if they manage to lock that down completely the flight controller completely replaced with one you can run open-source software on (as many do). And there is even a flight controller which can accept open source software which is (allegedly, I wouldn't be surprised if it's fraud) made in the US, so the recent ban wouldn't even make bad actors smuggle.
Honestly it's just a few engineer-months of work to spit out a prototype of such a thing, and I'm well aware of similar hobby projects. What you're asking for can also be produced pretty easily domestically (there are domestic PCB vendors and contractors that will place and solder parts, or just do it by hand). Whether anyone is actually is making it in the US a separate question.
ETA: The designs for such a controller are probably already on GitHub somewhere, to be honest.
These things CAN be produced domestically, but it can't be done economically, so there won't be large numbers of hobbyists any more. It is also likely the DHS and DoD expect to be able to lean on any domestic manufacturers to refuse to produce these, or to nerf them in some way.
I would be very surprised if OSHPark could figure out the use of a printed circuit board design from just the layout files you send them. They don't need a parts list or schematic. Sure, a lot of PCBs have text on them, but I've sent lots of PCBs out for fabrication with just part reference designators, design ID number, and maybe company name on them. Then send your parts order off to Mouser or DigiKey, and the parts list for a simple flight controller look a lot like pretty much any other project these days: a microcontroller, accelerometer chips, GPS parts, motor drivers -- none of those are out of place going into a car, wristwatch, cell phone, or anything else these days even if you do order them all at once. Sure, you'd like a tactical grade IMU and a better GPS receiver but those were out of your budget anyway and do get you put on a list (for existing EAR/ITAR reasons). Then put it together with a soldering iron. All in, you could probably manage something functional to drive a quadrotor for a couple hundred bucks.
It'd be hard to prevent folks from putting those parts together without kneecapping a bunch of US industry that is currently wrestling with tariff-induced redesigns ("can you make it cheaper now with non-Chinese parts?"). Quadrotor (and even fixed-wing) control is just not a particularly difficult problem in 2025 (nor was it really a decade ago).
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Making your own drone hardware is trivial. A high schooler could do it as a science fair project. Even if you had Shenzhen make the PCB, customs has no idea it's "drone hardware."
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The FAA has promoted a RemoteID system in the United States, and I think TheNybbler's commented on it and its problems before. Most modern drone receivers that fly-by-GPS have a fallback to safely land if GPS is interrupted and have some coded-in-keepout zones, but fly-by-eye or by-remote typically don't (or, in extreme cases, might be intended for use in GPS-less environments). And there's an absolute ton of old ones out there. And disabling an outbound antenna isn't that hard. And a lot of important keepout zones aren't permanent. And the software controller is largely not hard part of the drone software.
It'll probably help (and probably be frustrating) on the margins, but it's just extremely hard to lock things down that aggressively.
Yeah, that's probably true, and also probably something that could be a weapon of its own. I'd hoped that maybe you could treat the brushless motors like antenna, but the math doesn't really work out with modern tech.
Fair point, and sometimes those are somewhat hilariously aggressive -- tamed hunting falcons or dogs on one end, noise 'cannons' at the other -- though they're also all from back when we could Just Do Things.
I think you could maybe get away with an active transponder requirement (challenge/response cryptographic signature, at a minimum) for trusted airspace, otherwise authorities are allowed to shoot down first and ask questions later. And over time uncontrolled access could be limited to relatively safe areas (farmland or equivalent). As someone who has been at least a bit involved in the space since before DJI made drones good Christmas gifts, I feel for the RC plane community that has had to work hard to carve out their legal niche.
I thought it interesting that the wildlife specialist role required enough paperwork to get a security clearance (I assume for access to customs spaces? Maybe they're already doing drone things quietly).
On the topic of brushless motors, they're pretty high frequency drivers, but I don't think could work practically (OTOH it'd be "near field", which is well out of my wheelhouse).
Don't be; they were happy to try to throw everyone else who wanted to fly (helis, multirotors, small stabilized planes, first-person-view flight, jets, even giant-scale gliders) if only the FAA would let their clubs have a monopoly on flying WWII-style models in a circle. The FAA didn't buy it. Now they're looking to see if the FCC will give their clubs some sort of special exception to the new rules; they won't get that either.
They're only running at 16-24kHz, usually. You're not going to disrupt that remotely.
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