sales[ ]midnightblue[ ]nl PGP (0x9035856DF1D41F73) Overview Ever since the end of the cold war and throughout the conflicts of the 1990s and the early 2000s, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) ordroneshave obtained an increasingly prominent battlefield presence in roles ranging fromIntelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance(ISTAR / ISR) to combat missions such as multi-useUCAVsor single-usekamikaze dronesandloitering munitions.In civilian applications, drones are now commonly used in law enforcement, agriculture, oil & gas, energy, and logistics for everything from crop spraying to pipeline inspections. In this blogpost we will present a brief overview of common UAS radio links, especially as seen in FPVs, discuss why analog video links are still around, and briefly go over historical drone video feed interception incidents in military contexts in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Israel.In part 2 we will discuss the relevance of (analog) video links to Counter-UAS measures and the (in)security of video scramblers. In what has been called theFPV revolution, cheap, disposable, and easily assembled and modified small UAS with technological roots in theFirst-Person View (FPV) droneracing hobbyist environment have seen heavy military equipment destroyed in bulk on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war while drone-saturated kill zones have driven the frontlines into astalemate. FPV kamikaze drones played a key role in the UkrainianOperation Spiderwebtargeting Russian Air Force bases deep inside Russia. Asimilar deep strike operationusing small drones was undertaken by Israel against Iran during the 12-Day War of 2025. Likewise, Iran's mass produced, comparatively cheapShahedkamikaze drones (and their export to Russia and subsequent adaption into theGERAN) have been used inwaves in Ukraine for yearsand played anoutsized rolein the 2026 Iran war. While those conflicts have been the most visible, they are not exceptions. In the past 5 years alone, the prominent usage of cheap DIY drones by under-resourced militias in theMyanmar Civil Warand of heavier types of drones everywhere from theSudanese Civil Warto theSecond Nagorno-Karabakh WarandOperation Sindoorhas led analysts to ask whetherall wars are now drone wars. Drone security concerns are not restricted to open warzones either, as evidenced by the2019 drone strikeson Saudi oil refineries and by a series ofmysterious drone sightingsnear European airports and military bases in 2025 which were largely claimed to be Russian hybrid warfare signaling activity.Mexican drug cartelshave also increasingly adopted FPV drones forpurposesranging from attacks on rivals and security forces to ISR and smuggling. As such UAS of all sorts are highly interesting from acyber/ Electronic Warfare (EW) perspective, both in thinking through how to detect them, extract intelligence from them, and disrupt them as well as how to harden them against such measures. EW based Counter-UAS (C-UAS) measures were cited as amajor obstacleto the Indian military's use of drones in Operation Sindoor. It is important to acknowledge that EW measures in C-UAS are a rapidly evolving field.Especially in the Russia-Ukraine war, the widespread use of COTS components, open-source firmwares, and Software Defined Radio (SDR) components has allowed for rapid measure/counter-measure development cycles leading an article inIEEE Spectrum to dub it the first Hacker's War.The space is also neither uniform nor with clear directionality, what may be obsolete in one conflict zone (Ukraine) may be considered emerging tech in another (Myanmar), lessons learned by one military unit may not be quickly shared and distributed with others, and operators may find themselves coming back to technologies found vulnerable to one threat (eg interception) in the face of another (eg jamming) if the trade-off makes sense. ‍ UAS have lot of interesting aspect fom a cyber / Electronic Warfare (EW) perspective but of primary interest are their radio links. Not all UAS have such links, some use a combination of AI, computer vision, and on-board map data to navigate, or make limited use of GNSS augmented with Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), and others are controlled through tethered (fiber-optic) links. Still, many UAS (especially those with ISR or roaming combat missions) will have one or more of the below radio links. The typical UAS setup will include a Ground Control Stations (GCS) or individual operator somewhere in the (relative) vicinity of the UAS area of operations. Operators here will communicate through Line of Sight (LOS) links. Operational range can be extended with Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) capabilities in the form of either an on-board cellular modem (4G/5G) connecting to a local Mobile Network Operator (MNO), an on-board SATCOM terminal, or a (mesh) network of relay drones all relaying communications between a more remote GCS and the UAS. These types links can also co-exist, with a LOS video feed downlink b...