What would be needed to use existing cell tower/network infrastructure to track drones (re: recent drone "sightings" in the EU)

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Since it's already possible to measure a humans heart beat / pulse via WiFi ;-) and AFAIK existing cell towers

  1. have directional antennas
  2. have several cells per tower (I mean that there are several antennas for different segments of the whole circle)
  3. have beamforming capabilities
  4. do MiMo
  5. use open RAN / sd-RAN (software defined, basically SDR I think)
  6. are already kinda evenly distributed over the land (evenly in relation population density that is)
  7. use a bunch of frequencies for eg. 5G + 3/4G and more.

And radiolocating is a thing - so I had the very rough idea that tracking drones with that should be possible.

Thoughts?

Some of mine are: 1. sending out periodic sweeps/pings above the population via beamforming. 2. maybe adding more sensitive antennas to receive 1.'s echos. 3. passively listening in the air above human infrastructure (buildings). For a drone's radio signal and/or maybe even just it's electronic interference (the latter of course not with shielded professional/military drones). 4. training the "listeners" to ignore birds, drones that only move very localized and whatnot. 5. maybe the cell towers could monitor AM/FM/DVB-T/DAB frequencies from nearby radio towers and look for interference there? (frequencies and/or power probably too low?)

Where else can(/should) I post this idea?

submitted by /u/Nilm0
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from hacking: security in practice https://ift.tt/b2StsWk

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