Summary
Unmanned Flight - Cover Story
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Silent spies are listening.
Although widely associated with photo-reconnaissance and surveillance, UAVs can also be used for sigint (signals intelligence) tasks. Early in the Vietnam War, a pilotless aircraft was given the task of flying deep into North Vietnamese airspace. When attacked by one of the then recently-installed SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missiles, it successfully detected the radio transmissions from the Soviet missile's proximity fuze--information urgently needed by the designers of American electronic warfare systems. The mission demonstrated that the UAV could gather vitally needed sigint data, but only today is the concept approaching technological maturity.
In December 2000, an RQ-5A Hunter drone fitted with an experimental sigint payload flew a mission over Southern Arizona, successfully detecting and locating different types of radio-frequency emitter scattered ov...See the full content of this document
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