Questions about Predator drones

Factual Questions
1

Basically, I’m wondering if there are any people on the Dope who can answer some general questions about the C&C suite for the Predator armed ROV.

I’m wondering, first, what happens if the drone loses its control signal? Does the drone return to base, orbit at current elevation and position, or continue on the last stored mission profile?

Secondly, given the distance between the operator and the actual unit - does the Predator have any automatic evasion routines stored in its memory, and if so, have there been problems with it being glitchy?

Obviously, if someone does step up to answer these questions more questions will fall out of my head, but I figure these are enough to start the thread.

(And please, if the answers are in any way considered sensitive, just say so. I’m trying to keep things general, but … I’m not in a position to secong-guess security, and I know it.)

2

On a recent Future Weapons rerun they said that if it loses it’s link to the controller, via satillite, it can automatically return to it’s launch point where line of sight control would be used for the landing.

I see no reason why it couldn’t be programmed to perhaps orbit an area for some predetermined length of time incase the signal was regained. Or be programmed to proceed to a secondary recovery point if desired.