This is interesting, I was wondering about how heavy a 50km spool of 0.26mm drone spec optical fibre would be…
And while I did find suppliers for that, none told me a specific weight for a specific length.
It seems to be around 21kg, but I don’t know what length that refers to.
In any way, it is really impressive to be able to fly a drone with not only a heavy payload on it, but with 21kg added to it as well…
From the linked page:
The drone carries a 50-kilometer spool of Chinese-made G.657.A2 fiber, with a cable diameter of 0.26 millimeters. It uses digital video transmission and a low-light camera.
The video is impressive but also quite chilling. Glad the Ukranian military has good technology at its disposal, wish there were not so many people dying.
Like 50km fiber? How the hell does a drone pull that much?
it doesn’t, it’s already on the drone and gets uncoiled as the drone moves
Can it be reused/recycled? 0.26mm sounds like it would snap easily, so I would assume not, but does that then mean that there are 50km-long lengths of fibre strewn around Ukraine?
I don’t think it can be reused, and yes, there’s lot of glass fibre strewn across Ukraine. There are pictures of places where there’s been extensive battling and they are covered in spiderweb-like glass fibre
Free communications infrastructure! Very fragile! No question please…
Damn. I saw the headline, but I was afraid to look… Was hoping it was a bit hyperbolic :-(
“You stabbed me in the ASS!”
