The intent of the regs is to make the drone visible. I struggle to imagine any legitimate reason to use stealth tools on a civilian drone. But if you’re those guys in the other thread who are possibly flying drones over New Jersey…
As noted earlier, the term drone covers a lot of ground. From this paper:
Why are hobbyist drones so much cheaper? For one thing R&D is spread out over a larger number of units. Then there are issues of industrial organization:
Complexity and BS are independent variables. Complexity is defined as ease of screwing things up, very high in aerospace. BS is tendency towards suboptimal, cost-inefficient solutions, design & execution-wise, most commonly in the form of overkill. Public safety I would guess is in or near the military quadrant.
Hobbyist drones are in a BS- intolerant industry, the toy industry.
Obviously they aren’t doing a lot to make the drones invisible either.
I would think the biggest issue for military/police drones is flight time. I see most hobbyist drones are in the range of 30 min before they need a recharge or battery replacement (DJI Mavic 3 claims 43 min). If a police drone needs to get up, get to an area of the city, and then follow a vehicle, I don’t think that flight flight time will make the grade. A helicopter can do 2.5 hours, so I would think the minimum for a drone - possibly launched from a nearby police station parking lot rather than the local airport - would be 1 hr maybe with 1 hr there’s the option to tag-team. I don’t know whether drones are used for the more wide-area tasks like trailing cars yet.
Coiincidentally Google tells me the DJI Matrice 350 RTK (M350) is most commonly used by police, with a 55-min flight time. The camera add-on DJI Zenmuse P1 45mp Full-frame Camera can run close to $10,000 with a 45Mp sensor. I think most hobby drone cameras are not designed to take zoomed pictures from a long way off.
Matrice 350 RTK adopts DJI O3 Enterprise Transmission, which supports triple-channel 1080p HD live feeds, and a max transmission distance of 20 km. Both the aircraft and the remote controller have a four-antenna transceiver system, which can intelligently select the two optimal antennas to transmit signals, while the four antennas receive signals simultaneously. In this way, anti-interference capabilities are significantly improved, and transmission stability is optimized.
IF a drone were used to trail a fleeing suspect it would have to go faster than the fleeing suspect initially, to catch up to him (assuming he’s fleeing on an interstate); anything less than the military drones aren’t up to those speeds. Further, if the suspect flees in one direction (as opposed to getting off the interstate & driving around a neighborhood) the pilot can land at any nearby airport & get refueled. There may be a delay if it’s at one they don’t have a contract with but it’ll get done. However, if they fly a drone 1½ hrs downrange it doesn’t have enough battery to make it back. it’ll have to land somewhere & be retrieved, & you have to hope the person retrieving it is the person who is supposed to be retrieving it & not someone nefarious who stumbles upon it.
We’re a bit away from using drones to chase fleeing cars; it’ll happen but the technology isn’t quite there yet.
Here’s that drone with a combined zoom camera, wide angle camera, thermal camera, and laser rangefinder for a bit over $20k at B&H Photo. Batteries not included. (ETA: batteries are $700 each, a portable battery transport and charging station in another $1200).
Since the police are a Gov’t entity and these are surveillance devices (ie a camera), they fall under the McCain buy America Act. Even more expensive than tariffs.
Though given the possibility of Chinese spyware on a surveillance device for use in America, I’m not that bothered by a Buy America requirement.
Agreed. but it does cause budget problems for local governments that don’t realize what the law requires.
As I understand, most helicopter chases are following suspects driving rnadomly around town, trying to ditch following cops, and then into quiet neighbourhods to lay low, or back to their safe house. It’s reaely less than a few minutes to go find them and be in position based on car reports, i would imagine it’s a lot longer for a helicopter unless there’s a downtown helipad. I kind of imagine one of these distributed in several police stations all over a big city, so it would be easy to tag-team if necessary. Safer too, a criminal is less likey to drive dangerously fast and crazy if they don’t see chase cars right behind them.
And being less obnoious, loud and noticeable like a helicopter are probably easier to tail people with. And much cheaper.
I’m sure that a $20,000 drone has a lot more capabilities than a $200 one. But how does the $20,000 drone compare in capabilities to a fleet of 10 $200 ones? The fleet will be a lot more reliable against many failure modes, and also of course has the capability of being in ten places at once.
Different use cases? A swarm may be better for some use cases (kamikaze attacks evading anti-drone defenses, airshows), but worse for others (prolonged monitoring over an area requiring high altitudes and long loiter times… you can’t necessarily fly a bunch of $200 drones to the same height in sequence and still have any meaningful loiter time left over).
A swarm might also have its own failure modes, like RF jamming or high winds. It’s relatively easy for a single drone to manage its own position absent radio comms (like a cruise missile might, using terrain tracking or simple dead reckoning), but in a big swarm, it’s a lot harder for them to keep track of each other if they can’t talk to each other or satellites/ground stations. They also don’t have the airframe and power to resist wind conditions as well.
Oh… and birds! They can take down smaller drones. They’d just be minced by the bigger ones 
Did you drop a zero there?
I can buy 100 $200 drones for $20K. Not just 10.
For a police department? I suspect 98 of the 100 cheaper drones will be in storage at any given time. And there’s no way to replicate a $5k camera using 100x $5 cameras. It’s like asking to save money on police cruisers by buying a bunch of go carts.
Plus, if you imagine some contrived scenario where you could replicate performance of a more expensive drone with multiple less expensive ones, you still need to hire and pay the pilots, likely making it more expensive to do that.
Well, to begin with, are you hiring the other drone operators? Because these are not at all autonomous, especially at your proposed price point.
The cheap drones are fragile and much less able to operate in anything other than perfect weather. They have a much shorter operating range and mission endurance. Their cameras are cheap (not up to the job of identifying a face at a distance, for instance).
I was intentionally making the point that you could get, in some ways, better performance for an order of magnitude less cost.
Aaah. Gotcha. Agree in a lot of aspects.
The usual issue w Mil-spec, and I suspect “cop-spec” as well, is that the system’s full max case performance is rarely needed. When it is needed, it’s darn handy to have. But for most missions a less capable system is fully adequate. And the value of being able to be in multiple places at once really explodes when that multiple is 10 or 100.
I was at a staff meeting last week and we were given a drone presentation. We’re an electric utility and we want some to fly the lines to do inspections. We were told that to purchase a drone without Chinese parts would add about $10,000 to the cost of each drone.
And that’s while the rest of the supply chain can still use Chinese products. If the tariffs kick in, everything will get more expensive and businesses will have to pass that on…
Maybe if they are sustained for long enough, it’ll revive our manufacturing, but even then we can’t keep up with the costs of living and integrated efficiencies there.
I would think the main issue is the camera. Ignoring details like night vision, th problem with hobby drones is the camera. They don’t typically come with high power telephotos, so cannot do discreet surveillance.
If someone wants to, for example, do a news-copter type video of an event or incident, to get any decent picture a hobby drone would have to be almost “in your face” and very obvious. You can’t fly high enough to be unobvious and still get decent pictures of one individual or car. Decent optics are neither cheap nor light.
I follow one fellow who was a reporter in Gaza (Motaz Aziz, fortunately for him, out now) who used to get aerial footage with a hobby drone. At one point, it just flew away never to return. The IDF obviously had the tech to simply hijack it. A similar post from China showed a drone at some outdoor event slamming into the ground, the police shown allegedly using a “jammer gun” to bring it down. (Some replies suggested it was fake, and jamming GPS would simply have it land safely)