Design of Drone ID Decoder Using a Multiarray Directional Antenna and High-Speed Switch

Recently, the use of drones in wars and terrorism has rapidly increased, and various detection technologies are being developed to detect and analyze drone signals and obtain flight information to respond to threats, regardless of whether they are domestic or international. To detect drone signals in all directions, existing technologies apply omnidirectional antennas to a single receiver, which has a limited detection range. As the gain increases, the vertical detection range narrows. In addition, methods using directional antennas increase the detection range; however, they have the disadvantage of detecting only the direction in which they are directed or require multiple antennas and receivers, which increases the cost. In this study, we propose a method that uses a high-speed switch and a multiarray directional antenna in a single receiver to increase the omnidirectional detection and detection range of drone signals, and we fabricated and tested a prototype to verify this. The test results showed that the detection range performance was 1.65 times higher than that of a device using an existing omnidirectional antenna, and the signal decoding performance was 95 % in the 2.4 GHz band.