alt Hacker NewsShahed drones have increased in altitude from ~500m at the beginning of the Ukraine war to 2000-3000m, which is a 4x reduction in noise on the ground. The higher the drones are, the less noise they make at ground level, and the less effective this ground-based microphone system will be. The drones have moved to elevations to make them more difficult to target with ground based weapons. Reductions in ground noise are a secondary effect.
The latest versions of Shahed can reach 5000m in altitude, which would largely be inaudible on the ground.
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> ~500m .. to 2000-3000m, which is a 4x reduction in noise on the ground.
Radiative power drops by the square of the distance? Does anyone with a real physics background start demanding authority on a soapbox like this?
Could you simply use small cheap balloons with microphones to listen in higher altitudes? Or even small drones that carry the microphones with their own engine noise masked out?
Edit: as others say, plain radar will suffice.
It's not about "can reach", it's fairly easy to get them to fly even higher. It's about danger of interceptors vs danger of detection. Today's Ukrainian detection network (based on radars) is so dense there is no way to hide from it anywhere, anyway, so high altitude wins.
At those higher altitudes they are trivial for radar to detect, and from farther away too. They are adapting cheap commodity used marine radars to get this done in some places
I suspect the Shaheds are going higher to mitigate AA ground fire. Higher up you have to send a missile or interceptor up.
It’s a trade off.