(UA has been operating consumer drones on the front lines, because they're suicidal, desperate, or both. Consumer drones use narrowband transmissions on unlicensed radio bands, making them easy to jam and track. Military drones use spread-spectrum transmissions on restricted channels, making them harder to jam and detect, but are generally a hundred or a thousand times more expensive per unit.)
Like anything expensive sold to institutions, I assume DJI Aeroscope has some kind of yearly support contract, and the field terminal regularly phones home. It sounds like DJI has remotely terminated UA transponder receivers, and not done that with RU units, which UA is unhappy about. We also see the downsides of installing infrastructure operated by a hostile foreign power.
Can't say I'd be a fan of using that in a warzone, although I believe they can be hacked to not do that.
Pretty much every army on a budged uses DJI drones, because they make the best civilian UAVs period.
https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1509849258811445252
"The Ukrainian forces attacked an UAV unit of the Russian army. The drones themselves were not abandoned, however a control unit for an Eleron-3 light reconnaissance drone was captured and a cargo truck was destroyed."
Five Mavic 3 boxes visible.
Polish domestic military UAVs video feed quality looks downright pathetic when compared even to something like 6 year old <$1K Mavic Pro. https://www.wbgroup.pl/en/produkt/flyeye-unmanned-aerial-sys... ~$150K a pop.
So it would appear this development is conveniently in line with the Beijing Communist Party’s policy of enabling the rape and butchering of Ukraine.
And possibly one of the first real world examples, if intentional (note I didn’t say it was intentional but we don’t have evidence that it’s not, and no need to point out the converse), of the dangers of using technology sourced from a brutal dictatorship.
