 I love that, very thanks very much. Ted Ralston here folks. Friday afternoon on our show, Where the Drone Leads and Think Tech Away downtown. You can see we're taking the studio apart in the background. You can see a lot of the framing and such, but don't worry, the show will continue on. And of course this show is the very last thing you have to do before beginning a three-day weekend. So we appreciate you sticking with us. And even though we're in the process of reconstructing the studio here. Anyway, Ted Ralston here. Our host today is John Mullen. John is in just north of San Francisco at home. John, you there? Yes, hi there. John, you're guilty of not having been on the show in the last six months, you know. Sorry. It's good to have you back on again. And as I mentioned, our studio is being reframed here. You can see in the background. You are in a really interesting place there. You've got timbers behind you and all kinds of interesting looking cathedral structure. Where are you at, John? It's an A-frame, A-frame house in the woods. Just about a half hour from downtown San Francisco. Okay. Oh, there is actually green grass and dirt and stuff within a half hour drive from San Francisco. Oh boy, it is there. It's, you know, the headlands where there's very few houses and all that stuff. That's great. And then you guys have had some heavy weather this week, haven't you? Very heavy weather. A lot of rain and uprooted trees. There's two major freeways down. Highway 37 and Highway 113 are both not operable because there's many trees over them. And you're kind of a guy who totally depends on connectivity. How's that been in the face of all that storm? I've got a lot of backup. Many different ways. I'll bet you do. That's cool. That's all right, John. That's great. And of course, we have here about a beautiful week. It's been a corner winds pretty much. So clear skies and a lot of heat and oceans beautiful. So anyway, comparison of two sides of the Pacific here. But John, the subject we thought we'd talk about today is something that you are pretty close to that of counter drone. We're talking about normally about productive means of drone uses on this show. But every now and then we have to stand back and think about the potential counter uses, malicious uses, adverse uses that people could either, either with intent or by accident get into in terms of drone usage and the potential downside risk that comes to the population as a result of that. I'll bet you spent some time thinking about that this week. I have spent a lot of time, yes. Okay, great. And we'll be thinking about that a lot next week, too. As you know, we had some visitors out here talking about that very subject. But I think when we speak of drones and counter drone, it's probably confusing to a lot of people who aren't very close to say where the technology is all going. And I wanted to think of it this way. We've taken on the show for this year coming up to consider 2017 to be the year of community outreach and community involvement in drones so that we can make sure the story gets distributed and passed and integrated with the schools and the people and organizations and such that potentially will come in contact with drones that will find them useful to them in such agriculture, education, environmental, coastal sciences and such, all participants in the future of drone utility. But I think, as I think about it actually, part of the community outreach and community involvement would include the safety and the protection against the misuse of drones. And drones could be misused accidentally. They could be misused intentionally. They could be misused only because the circumstances under which they're being used weren't thoroughly considered. So there's a lot of reasons that counter drone is an important aspect. I guess in the maybe analogy is that antivirus is a pretty important part of our operations daily with our computers and our laptops and such. So if you think about that, John, what are the components, the elements, the pieces that make up a counter drone frame of mind? I think in the public, first it's privacy. There's been ever since years now people in their back yard and don't want to be spied upon and there's a drone coming over and there's been people that have gotten their shotguns out and blown them out of the sky and then there's a civil litigation about who did what and who's right and who's wrong and who owns what airspace and still being all ironed out and then there's religious ceremonies and then there's the press trying to get in and then who's right and who's wrong there. You've got the loud buzzing sound and potential falling out of the sky, correct? So there's a lot of, I think, civil issues that have to be worked out. There's the FAA that's gone back and forth on what regulations you have to have to fly a drone and that's changing all the time. And then as you know, there's the military and the other use of drones which is defensive and offensive weapons and then protection and all of that. So there's many dimensions. I mean there's components to watch for drones whether you listen acoustic or whether you see a camera that's ready to see it or you somehow pick up the radio frequencies or radar. I mean those are all different things how you blast it out of the sky. You either push the electronics back at it and tell it to go away or you blast it with something and there's many dimensions. So we can actually maybe relabel that term counter drone which we throw around relatively loosely. We could maybe relabel that drone security or something like that which has in it the counter aspect and has in it the defeat aspect and it has in it all the social connections and the social permissions and legalities that you mentioned. There's a term other than counter drone that applies here in the larger scope and I think from our taking this obligation of making 2017 the year of community involvement we probably have to come up with the right term there. Yeah and there's different terms and different spaces. I mean as we're talking community involvement that probably doesn't include the defense department. Is that community involvement? So if we're talking community involvement you're probably talking public policy and municipal but it does overlap to airports and air traffic control and the drones have an electronic signature and electronic communications which can interdict and cause problems with other critical services. That's interesting so that not only is there the issue of the drones use being potentially misdirected but what you're suggesting is just the way drones operate with the radio communication maybe even the video downlink and such that could have some unintended interference with other civil operations. That's right, exactly right. In Hawaii it could affect the radio telescope up in the mountains or it could affect the air traffic or it could affect police communications or it could affect military. So even a small low power transmitter either the handheld ground controller or the transmitter on the UAV itself those are potential sources of electromagnetic interference. There's one today that the FAA is going after that was put on the market you can buy from the internet that will directly affect air traffic control signals and it's set up for people to use for drones and I don't know what country it comes from but if you buy it and plug it in you're breaking along. What does this thing do? It's a controller for drones on a different frequency than the standard frequencies but it steps on the air traffic control frequencies. What you're saying is I understand it now that most of the drones we have in this country and probably everywhere are on the unlicensed public frequencies 0.4, 0.5, 0.8 and those that are available for garage door openers, medical devices Wi-Fi and drones and you're suggesting that somebody's making a device that illegally uses the wrong frequency spectrum and as a result could potentially step on other people who are using that spectrum. Exactly, exactly. And how do we stop this? How do we open it? People that are putting this stuff out and they're such demand and interest they're not observing the laws. I mean it's always happened. It's always happened with the amateur radio and the rest of it where somebody kind of overlaps or does something and then they get caught and then they come back and then it's adjudicated, it's a civil tort or it's whatever but here we are but there's such demand right now in the drone area that I think you're seeing aggressive and a little bit more in this area. So maybe part of this public outreach and community involvement is some form of recognition that there are domains of legal operations such as frequencies, radio frequencies and advise the public that there are potential violations of that and I wonder how the public would even discover something like that. This is a very complex subject for the public to grab a hold of. I got it from the amateur radio magazine. I'll bet I know who you got that from. Exactly. She's sitting right out there. Great. So it's not going to go to the general public but it's going to go to anybody who's reading and digging deep into radio frequencies and in my, I'm an old guy, right? It's like Wolfman Jack used to probably... I think I'm probably older. I don't know but across the... When I was going to high school the earth was just crusting over. We went to bed on a Tuesday night and there were these piles of molten basalt and such and by the next day they had crusted over on Wednesday morning and got up. The guy named Wolfman Jack was broadcasting across the other side of Mexico, you know, across the border and he was using some illegal pirate frequencies and F.A. couldn't touch him because he was Mexico but he was broadcasting all over Southern California, you know, hip-hop radio, well before hip-hop it was some sort of rock and roll sort of thing where you're overlapping frequencies but in this case it's the air traffic control so planes could theoretically fall out of the sky which is not a good thing, right? So, you know, you have to pay attention it has to be enforced, it has to be caught but when somebody's got one of these rogue transmitters someplace he's got to turn it on before you see that he's doing it, you know, so it's... You can't tell it's on until it's on. Right, it's kind of the reason that the police have those cell phone scanners now, what do they call them? Tiger sharks or something? And they use them to see if people are making phone calls while they're driving and then there's all the ACLUs up in arms because what are you doing? Let's snooping in on my phone calls but, you know, it's back and forth again, same stuff. So we're going to have to probably at some point in time have a scanner that looks for radio frequency interference and operations in domains that are infrastructure critical such as air traffic control that are not licensed. Right. I guess that's the way of the world, isn't it? Every time you have something that works for you, you have to protect against it being used in the adverse way either by accident or by intent. Right. Well, when people weren't doing much radio frequency then we could kind of sit back and not have to do all this but when you introduce things like a lot of drones that are doing a lot of activity and some of them are homemade and some of them come from other countries and some of them are this and that, you're just increasing the spectrum which means you're going to have to govern it better. That sounds like a subject for RTCA the folks at the Department of Commerce who try to sit on top of all the spectrum usage and such. It does. I don't know them very well. Are you familiar with them? I've had to file so many papers every time we run a test anywhere like jumping through 100 hoops to just file the papers to be able to put it in the sky, right? And yes I have been unfortunately and I mean they're trying to do their job I'm not criticizing it's just it's not easy, right? You know that actually opens up an entire domain here and that is the just as we have so many more drones and systems of ground controllers and the aircraft entering the mix we're going to have mutual interference in some way I would think between ground controllers and aircraft and people inadvertently getting a control of somebody else's drone we're going to have this sort of self inflicted complication as a result as well we're going to need standards aren't we not in the radio domain to try to sort this thing out? Yes. That's with drones that you fly with a joystick but if you get drones that are autonomous and basically give them a flight pattern and get out of the way then it's a little bit different situation. This is a really complex future let's think about that over the first break here come back and figure out how we're going to identify and make a picture of this problem and then figure out how we can attack it after the first break here. Great. My name is Ray Tsuchiyama and I'm from Kalihi Palama spent 20 years in Tokyo, Japan I came back after the great earthquake I watch think tech all the time and hope everybody follows it on the internet because it is a program that is devoted to the future of Hawaii and brings all concerned citizens together to create a better society for all. Hi I'm Marianne Sasaki and I'm here today to tell you about the women's march on Washington on January 21st it's an incredibly significant march in which both men and women are going to stand up for women's rights women's reproductive rights and all the rights we've accrued over the past 40 or 50 years there's also going to be marches in each city on each island there's one in Oahu I urge you to join a march and stand up for women's rights. Ted Ralston here folks hosting our show where the drone leads Think Tech Hawaii on Friday afternoon this is the second half of our show we've installed these really advanced technology teleprompters here in the studio so if I was to read it I might actually read somebody else's script so we'll continue with the unscripted form of this program as long as we can. If you hear me say something like when in a course of human events you'll know we're reading somebody else's script from many years ago. Anyway John Mullen is standing by basically north of Sausalito California John one of our frequent commentators and great knowledge of things that are coming at us in the world of drones and we're talking today about the really complicated future space electronically electromagnetically that is necessary as a accompaniment to drone operations and and this leads to the the protection against drones being misused and the term counter drone which as we're discovering is probably a too broader term so John you were outlining just before the break about how complex this electromagnetic environment is going to be and in the past that electromagnetic environment if it was air traffic it had knowledgeable compliant people involved if it was the airplane side it had knowledgeable compliant people in it with heavily controlled and protected ever since 1927 when RTCA was created to solve problems of radios getting on airplanes but the emerging world of drones doesn't have that framework of control or even that framework of knowledge necessarily behind it we have manufacturers putting things out that are rapidly available and are rapidly emerging in in like software defined radios and things that have a lot of capability that we never saw before so the this infrastructure that we're creating and we're in the middle of in fact making it happen is getting more complex than can be defined even so John you're in that game the cyber game how do we even characterize what this emerging future looks like so we can figure out where the issues are that need to be protected well it does change every day okay so we're late we're day late already we haven't done today's homework yet but I think you're right categorizing when humans go after any complex problem the first thing they try to do is categorize and try to make a model a mental model and then they try to address the components of the model and it's how we learn it's how we do everything and so we have to do here and you know the good news is the FAA and others have done a good job of defining the frequencies and the waveforms and categorizing them I think the bigger issue is being able to identify and enforce any violations and you pointed out earlier that there's going to be either interdiction or conflict or some sort of when you overload a certain area with radio frequencies there's unexpected results sometimes you you know you get somebody else's control but more often than not just nothing works very well and gets scattered and starts to fall apart and that's definitely going to happen but I did I think it's hard to fly a drone I think for everybody it's hard to fly a drone it's hard to fly radio controlled airplanes you know you have to practice a whole lot and you crash a whole lot of times before you get to learn how to do it and but the drones that I've been seeing are many more are autonomous where they you have a screen you just press this button this button this button this button and say fly here then fly here then fly here then for here go there for three minutes at 200 feet go here for seven minutes at 400 feet and you never get on a joystick and I see that's where things are going it's a lot easier and humans like things that are easier it's too complicated to do the other but so I think it's going to get it's going to change you know it's hard to fly and they crash and if you buy a new drone it might last you a week or it might last you a day but if you have these autonomous ones it might last you six months or a year so I think it's going to change quickly that's interesting and of course the autonomy adds that more comprehensive mission I think for a less complicated operation structure but it also in the autonomy domain it diminishes the communications aspect because the thing can be out doing its own mission and there's no communication with the ground station at all except maybe a handshake every 10 minutes or whatever it takes to keep the radios alert and aware of each other the unit itself would be providing its position information down to the ground station so you can track it so you have a one-way down but it certainly the higher the level of autonomy the less communication there is and in some ways I guess that's good in other ways that means it's harder to track yeah it takes it over it can do things you don't want it to do I mean I'll thank you well you know in addition to the malicious aspects just the normal aspects of drone usage are going to require some form of surveillance and tracking and plotting to look at potential interactions and collisions and such NASA has a program called UTM Unmanned Traffic Management and testing has been done over the last couple of years looking at pieces of the solution and recently a fairly comprehensive program was run where a bunch of different drones are run at different parts of the country and it was found out that as long as everything worked everything worked but as soon as there was a disruption to the pattern of any kind either because a guy missed his waypoint the crosswinds were too high and the drone didn't have enough performance to get back on track or in one case an ambient airplane just came flying through and everybody had to go into a protective mode as soon as the nested set of moving dynamic pieces was disrupted there was not enough capability to get back on track and so as soon as there was a least level of technical or procedural variation the whole system kind of collapsed so obviously some frame of complex system modeling or something is going to have to happen here John so that these as the numbers increase and their utility is in different domains and such there's a picture painted in the local area or the broad area that defines what's going on and looks for patterns this is turning into a cyber situation even without contra-grown or malicious effects normal operations are going to require a cyber approach that's true but you see we see the same thing in big airplanes I mean when everything's going well everybody leaves on time and lands on time when there's a big weather pattern or broken equipment or a crew doesn't make it to their thing on time the disruption happens and if it's a big disruption it takes days you know and you're right it gets complicated nobody knows what's supposed to happen and you miss this flight and you miss this connection to this connection to this connection and so it's in both it's in both worlds but I agree with you and I can tell you I've dealt with some of the airlines on these issues and I know you have in different worlds and you know even buying tickets and getting seats at the last minute when there's some available and all of that is they spend a lot of money and a lot of time trying to optimize the profits to stay in business but when a weather thing comes through or other ones come through the disruption happens and all bets are off really you make an interesting point and that analogy is worth exploring the commercial airline business like 12,000 airplanes in the US probably half of them flying at any one time so we're looking at a pattern of 6,000 maybe 8,000 elements in the sky or on the ground that are in operation and with very compliant operators and very structured training and very structured performance and behavior the technical performance climb rate and accelerations and this sort of thing operation with a single mode failure all that's well defined and in fact when there's a missed approach or some other reason that you have to adjust the situation at the airport everybody knows where to go for their holding pattern it's all planned and trained so it's a well structured system dynamic but it's only 5,000 8,000 items at any one time if we look at 5 years and I with drones we'll have 500,000 in the country and none of that pre-existing training and procedures none of that's going to be present there is no nobody cares about it they will start caring when that $3,000 drone you just bought for the power company ends up in the water and you have to alibi to your boss as to what happened to it worse it hits a power line so there is going to be a need to take this analogy that works in manned aircraft and figure out how it's going to expand into the world of unmanned aircraft and admittedly the numbers may be high but the altitudes are going to be low and the range of operation isn't great so we're talking about much smaller domains but we are still aren't talking about potential issues that are going to be harmful that we have to think about it as you mentioned kind of a drone going down into a power plant substation or something like that cause some disruption that has to be corrected so John you or somebody has to figure out how a model this is a big data problem isn't it this is a it's a management control problem you know I've always said this and maybe I'm wrong here but I think the drones have to have internal automatic controls in them to say I can't fly to this spot I can't fly over an airport I can't fly over a freeway and they have to be able to be self enforced and they or if they get too close to another drone I have to be able to like cars like the self driving cars we're trying to do can't crash into it right so I think it has to come from inside the electronics and the avionics of the drones that's interesting so there could be geofencing there could be performance fencing there could be remaining battery time fencing there could be all kinds of different term and limits that could be applied and then when that when that limit is hit the mission has to be over you have to go to a reversion mode of some kind and do it in such a way that you don't harm the rest of the unmanned air traffic that's going on so once again we're talking about basically an industry issue and somewhere RTCA, ASTM somebody has to grab this bull by the horns and start thinking about how we're going to measure it and how we're going to model it and how we're going to establish standards that those who enter the mix are going to have to obey and then this reaches back into the manufacturing and design of drones to make sure they have that capability for handling common mode failure or single mode failure or whatever it may be that we decide it would be cool to do that John you've got the but once again it turns into a cyber problem and that's where you come in because you're solving, identifying and looking at cyber deviations and variations I don't like to over regulate anything but this I mean what else do you do I mean you can't depend upon the pilots to do this themselves it's impossible so they have to be able if you're going to fly this many drones they have to be able to behave behave themselves and so that's there are the electronics you have to put in the sensors the little radar sensors and the avionics controls all that but also you have to make sure that drones coming into the country either with intent or not with intent are compliant which to me again it sounds like over regulation you're going to have to be able to say what are the licenses who owns that drone what's it's unique identifier and you know who do I blame when it crashes and it burns everything and on top of all that when and if something does go wrong we have to be able to get it out of the sky and correct it right now and so John we've outlined a really interesting problem if we could get paid to do this the next couple of years we'd be doing alright so let's figure out how to do that how to stand this problem up and get people to pay attention to it the only way you're going to be able to do it is charge people that are putting the drones in the sky that's where it's going to come from at the end of the day so we hate to end the show with that note so let's make it a positive note the drones are here for good and we just have to make sure they don't wander off in the wrong direction