A Software Defined Radio Based Implementation for the Radio Frequency Analysis of Signals from Unmanned Aerial Systems

Civilian unmanned aerial systems can pose a serious threat to the civilian population. For this reason, the development of an assistance system to counter these threats is the scope of an ongoing research project. Its goal is to detect inbound drones and to provide the user with a comprehensive situation analysis and risk assessment. The focus of this paper is a software defined radio based implementation of a radio frequency analysis, which is capable of eavesdropping on the drone’s radio signals, in order to gather information for the assistance system. In the paper the implementation for one exemplary drone system, based on the Pixhawk autopilot and the MAVLink communication protocol, is proposed and the results of the initial tests are presented.