 It is noon in Honolulu, folks. Ted Ralston here, hosting our show where the drone leads on Think Tech Hawaii. And it is noon here. That must be six o'clock on the east coast where we have John Franklin standing by. John is the first time around the show. We'll hope to have him back a lot more. But John represents a really extremely important part of this whole drone domain, and that's the domain of counter drone. John, welcome on board. Ted, happy to be here. Okay, cool. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, and the perception you guys have built on this issue called counter drone, which has so many components to it. Sure, sure. So my own personal background is technical, you know, math and physics, and you know, spent the first part of my career in the defense industry, you know, think tanks and government labs and that sort of thing. So I kind of had a target identification, you know, to tech, track, and engage background. And then a few years ago, drones started coming out of the market. And I remember the first time I saw one, you know, I was probably way behind the curve, but I was at the mall and I was in a sharper image and they had a parrot, you know, one of those little iPhone-controlled parrots. And it was like sitting there hovering in the store, and I was just blown away by the fact that it was handling all the actual steering. And now I was thinking of all things I could do with this thing. I could put it up, check out my roof, you know, see if I've got leaks or something like that, water pooling. Took it home, lost in the backyard, living downtown D.C. by the way. And this was before drone crash on the White House lawn. And first thing it did was flop over, first thing it did was flop over into the neighbor's yard. And me and a lot of the cameras, you know, looking in their window and they're making dinner and I've got to kind of sheepishly knock on the door and ask for my drone back and, you know, meanwhile I know what they're making for dinner. So you're a good case of the reason for counter drones. You yourself are a great expression of that need. Yeah. So I know that even today with as good as these things have gotten, there's a risk that the first time you put one of these up in the air, you're going to crash it and, you know, and it gets much worse than that. Right. So it's people doing what they know they're not supposed to be doing. There's people who are intentionally delivering contraband to prisons. You know, the list goes on as far as how to use these inappropriately. And the root cause of that, the theme I think that's driving that is just thinking of your perimeter as a line on the map is obsolete now. You know, it's just so easy to circumvent any fence line or triple fence line. And that leads to all sorts of trouble. So that's exactly right. And I think in Hawaii, we have a compelling need to start thinking about counter drone in a soft and easy fashion. We're not talking about the military side of defeat and takeover and crash them and this sort of thing, but simply find out where they are, find out who's operating them and let them be aware of what the rules are, and the rules they may be in violation of and let them go either get right permits, get the right training and operate correctly or stop operating. So that's kind of where we are right now. And you and Maya, who's helping you there, I think, appreciate her being on the show too, are going to be, I think, very useful to the evolving strategy, if you will, business strategy of getting drones into the infrastructure, not only for the sake of protection of public events and such where the nuisance factor could be up, but even in the more commercial and legitimate use of drones, such as power line surveillance, if a power company is out managing its power lines by flying drones, it wants to know if there's a drone that they don't know about that's following them, for example, like to know what that's all about and at least identify and maybe track where it's coming from. Or let me give you an example we had here in Hawaii some time ago, a ship grounding and the ship grounding on the reef, the ship has to be pulled off the reef by the salvage company and then the reef has to be observed for the damage on it and go get funding to get reef repaired. And so a commercial drone company was hired to illustrate or to find that information, that imagery of the pre and the post on the ship grounding. And as he was out there doing the flying, a second drone showed up of the same type because they're all inspires, flying the same path and recording the same imagery, but nobody knew who he was. And so the legitimate commercial operator right away figured out this was a bootlegger who was going to come in and try and sell the imagery at half the price and sneak in under the wire. So everywhere you go this need for identification and tracking surveillance and identification certainly is present. So and continuing in my monologue here, and we don't allow monologues on the show by the way, but there's a lot of folks who have developed elements of this of the counter drone function. I was intrigued by a discussion last week with the FAA where they mentioned that for the unsophisticated malicious or nuisance user, more than likely 90% of the time they can be identified by the radio connection between the ground controller or the hand controller and unit itself. A more sophisticated operator would have found ways to disguise that or to run autonomously or in some other fashion become less detectable. But for the things we're dealing with in general, the highly detectable radio communication system seems to be a good starting place. And tell us about how that works within the structure of the Jones field technology inventory. Sure. Yeah. So we you're right. You're exactly right. So most of what you see are what we call unmodified commercial off the shelf. It's just been bought and nobody did anything to it. It does what it needs to out of the box. And in those cases, there's a few dominant players DJI, 3DR unique. I think there's a pretty long tail, but I haven't found the right numbers. But 90% of the market is DJI or 80% or something like that. Certainly I was on vacation in the Greek island and I saw five drones while I was there. Four of them were phantoms and one of them was a Mavic Pro. So I do believe they're killing it, as they say. So yeah, they have a couple of well known protocols that have been studied extensively. So that's a giveaway, right? So that's on the table to take advantage of. And certainly that's the easiest way to do it. I mean, this signal is designed to be received. It's a communications protocol that you're going to get a really good range and and take it from there. But I think it's don't give up the easy point is what I like to say. It's one of the most effective ways to detect these drones that are unmodified. So what you would do is I just put up antennas in a structured way and receive the signal, do some time on the signal or some correlation and some line of bearing and this sort of thing and do some math and some trigonometry and come up with some information that might lead to where a drone might be and where the operator might be. Yeah, the way our great efficacy direction finding system works, phased array of spot antennas that does beam forming. And so I can tell what direction the signal is coming from, maybe plus or minus two degrees. And then you if you have two of these and they're spread apart, you can kind of hash the emitter characteristics and come up with a number and then you can compare those numbers between all the signals that are coming into each system. And if you get two matches, then you can intersect the lines of bearing and that'll give you the vicinity of the drone. What if we have say 15 in the air at the same time within a half mile radius we'll say? I think you get a lot of intersections in a tight area, but I don't think there'd be any capacity limitation. So the matchmaking function within the electronics is okay on high density. It's not going to bother it. I don't think so. I mean to be honest, in arm testing we tend to be pilot limited and I haven't put up 15 at a time. You know that's editorially but offline that whole subject of pilot limitations is certainly a big factor in what we are here call the workforce development aspect of education. We don't have enough drone pilots to serve the commercial industry if they ask for one more person. And we're using airline pilots and this sort of thing and reprocessing them in this domain and together we have to come up with an educational framework that will produce educated people and train people, certify people in the world of flying, in the world of design, in the world of counter drone. So it's a really exciting time. Getting your 107 and actually flying a mission successful mission. Yeah, 107 has its own downsides that are subject to yet another discussion called liability. But in any case, talk about the company and what else do you make besides the electronic detection systems? So we started life as, Drone Shields started life as a passive acoustic detection company. So we've always been a counter drone business. But about two, three years ago, we were using microphones to do it. And microphones are actually an interesting way to do it. I can't tell you how many times, like for example, in my story when I was on vacation, the first thing I do is I hear it. I don't see it. Maybe it's just I've been doing this so long that I'm tuned into that. But without a doubt, I'm going to hear it before I see it. And so we picked up on that. We used omnidirectional microphones and long range microphones, high gain microphones. And what we found was while it was an interesting and robust feature to detect, you know, these things have been optimized for a bunch of features, endurance, light, weight, payload capacity. Most of the time they haven't been optimized for being quiet. And I don't think people, if you told someone this drone, half as loud as the other one, but it flies half as long, I don't think too many people would be interested in that. And so I think it's a robust feature, but it's an unintentional mission unlike the RF signal. And so there's no guarantee of how far away you're going to be able to detect it. So one of the things that we found with acoustics is that with the mercy of three factors that we have no control over, one is the source characteristic. Again, these are unintentional missions. The next one is the back of the environment, the background noise levels. You know, it's going to be a lot different story if you're in a rural environment versus a downtown environment. And the third one was the channel characteristic. So the temperature and humidity and the wind and basically anything that's going to influence how well that source makes it to our sensor. And so as a result of all these factors combining, you know, we would see 20 to 50 percent differences in range performance day to day or season to season. And so we decided we needed to take back some predictability, some in terms of our range performance. And so we quickly branched out into the classic system, which is a radar, right? They've been using radar. And the problem with radars, most of them at least, is that they're essentially motion detectors. You know, they find things that are moving in the environment and put a dot on the map, but they'll put a dot on the map for birds and for vehicles and for, you know, drones and maybe some leaves that are fluttering. So there's a bit of a noise problem there, even though they're tremendously useful. And so what we're really focusing on right now as a company is using other sensors to kind of help enhance that radar picture. So using RF to associate radio frequency activity with the drones, tying in, you know, a very narrow field of your cameras to slay the camera to the the radar track to get a visual confirmation. This is really a multi-spectral, multi-sensor integration pattern recognition problem. It's kind of heading for the domain of complex adaptive systems. It's heading for the domain of big data at some point in time. Really exciting stuff. Let's do this. Let's talk about how that turned into a company and how your relationship with your Australian element is and how that all turns into a business structure for your operation in the U.S. When we get back from our first break and bring Maya on, please, next time. Sounds good. Thank you. This is Stink Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. All the better to see you with my dear. What are you doing? Okay. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. This is the starting line. Push. Read aloud 15 minutes, every child, every parent, every day. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech, Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. It is still noon in the noon hour anyway, folks. Ted Ralston here in Honolulu. Our Think Tech studios show where the drone leads with a fantastic discussion going on with John Franklin, who is the Chief Technology Officer, Chief Science Officer at Drone Shield, LLC in Washington, DC, and Australia. John, welcome back on again. Thank you. Really interested in that conversation. So we, the conversation before the break, you were going through the various forms of detection that apply to either in unintentional or intentional signals emitted by drones. And to summarize, you started with acoustics, thought about visual, thought maybe about thermal. I mean, I've actually seen some of these things through thermal scopes, and they do light up pretty good at a distance. Then radio frequency, and maybe radar along the way somewhere. So pulling all that together into a sensed and reasonably accurate picture is an interesting complex procedure. Then on your website, we saw some pretty heavy looking equipment that looks like it emits some kind of a counter radiation and does something to the control system, which probably isn't going to happen in the US for a long time because of our various rules here. Talk to us a little bit about how all that signal integration occurs and how the ability to receive that information can keep up with the changing technology in the transmission side or the other signal side of drones as they come forward. Yeah, so that's a very good question, a huge question. I mean, we could kind of unpack that a number of different ways. I'd say, you know, as you add sensors to your sensor suite, generally you do so to make up for shortcomings in what you've got already, right? But what you have to be worried about is that at the end of the day, you don't have the worst of all sensors, right? You don't have all the false alarms of the radar and all the clutter of the RF. So the nature of the game is trying to fuse them in a way that you enhance the overall system performance. So we're talking a little bit about false alarms and track accuracy. So you can, they're very, you know, well-defined and intuitive numbers that you can tie to system performance. So I think you mean a lot for the end user. And I think that's how you should manage progress and judge whether a new sensor technology brings anything to the table. It's great seeing the next generation on this show, by the way. Bring her up. It's perfectly fine. Hi, Maya. So that's, that then leads to the question of the FAA test ranges and the role they might play in counter drone evaluation and false positives and coming up with figures of merit and measures of effectiveness that people are going to want to know about when they go buy something. Right now, there's no standards, there's no way to evaluate any of the 100 purveyors of counter drone functionality that are out there. You know, I've worked with about three or four, some I can't even get on a phone anymore because their phones have been disconnected. So there's a message there. And coming up, I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but coming up with some form of standards would be really, I think, important here. Just think of police radar guns, I'm guessing. There must be some standards that they, that they are applied to them in terms of distance and response rate and clutter and things like that. I mean, background effects would be, would have an effect, I would think, on that. So collectively, we have to structure some way to test these things and then come up with figures of merit. We have, the military has a long history of evaluating radar performance. So there's a lot of numbers that, you know, can pull apart radar performance and track accuracy, track continuity, you know, how long are you completeness, that kind of thing. Did you ever miss the, miss the, miss the object? And then the other thing I wanted to add is, is one of the best things or one of the hardest things I'd say about testing stuff is, is collecting ground truth. So having, you know, if you go, it's one thing to say, invite the, the sensor company down to the test range and allow them to be there while you're flying all sorts of drones. But to make that truly useful, they need accurately timestamp data with really good accuracy location ground truth. Kind of, and it'd be nice if you put a GPS collar on all the birds area as well. So you need, you need background characterization in order to evaluate what the, what the sensors systems are pulling up. That's certainly a challenge. And that would mean you probably want to start with a very constrained area and open up the constraints as time goes on as you get good at it. But, but, but we're going to have to get there. Otherwise, it won't be possible to test these systems and judge their utility in, in anything other than the, the straightforward environment they've been operating to date. Yep. We found that, we found that in our own experience with acoustics, you know, we've, we got it working so we thought in our own backyards. And, you know, first time it turned on in Japan, we had different birds, different insects, different traffic noise, different, you know, just about everything you can think of is different. And I think that's going to be the same for, you know, just about any technology, you know, that, you know, emitter strength are regulated differently in the EU and Japan especially than they are here. Okay. So this is an interesting complex problem, but it won't go away anytime soon. And in fact, it's kind of, if you, if you look at the investment going on within the world of drones, counter drone may be the highest investment aspect at this point in time in terms of who's funding what. The drones themselves will be, well, that is the flight vehicle itself will be pretty much the, the mule, the carrier and the sensors, the sensor software and the counter drone functions are the place where the investment seems to be going on at the highest. And so this is a long career ahead of you and a long value stream for the company. So talk a little bit about how the company works with, how do you work with the Australians and what kind of marketing have you got? Well, sure. So we didn't have the advantage of, you know, being on the West Coast and the traditional kind of the traditional venture capital markets. And so we had to find our own path here on the East Coast and DC. We took some seed investment and then took another round of debt financing. And then we were able to meet up, link up with a private equity firm in Manhattan that specialized in of all things listing companies, micro capital, micro cap companies on ASX. And there's kind of two places in the world, sorry, the ASX with the Australian Stock Exchange. And so there are two places in the world where you can list a company publicly, a small company and be taken seriously. One is the Australian Stock Exchange and the other is the alternative investments market on the London Stock Exchange. And it's just a lot cheaper and simpler, I understand, to do so in Australia. So we went through that pretty painful process. But, you know, we have a whole, luckily, we have a great team in Australia that keeps us on the right side of all the regulations and bookkeeping and reporting requirements. That's all stuff I, you know, was spared from as a tech guy. And I think it's a really neat model because now you don't have, you know, one big investor to answer to. You have a market to answer to. The market's pretty, pretty responsive to kind of fundamental things like sales and that sort of thing. So in that sense, the situation we have in the US, of course, is pretty much going to be identify, track and locate as opposed to the heavy countermeasure aspects. So it'll be counter detection, more so than countermeasures, at least on the civil side. How do you see that play out on the rest of your market in Australia and the rest of the world? Yeah, so yeah, so that our technical team is actually split. So we have a team in Australia and we have a team here mostly on the east coast of the US. And so it's really neat to be in that kind of environment. A lot of late nights, but the company's really working 24 hours a day. Oftentimes we'll finish a conversation. There'll be some somewhere to pick up in the morning. So I do like that. That's kind of like a virtual international operation. Yeah, now it's very important to have good, I've got a gigabyte internet connection, which is comes in handy for shipping data around the world and cool. Well, we certainly respect what you're doing and would like to learn more, would like to generate programs here at the university. In conjunction with you, we have some folks working on unpacking the command structure and looking at the protocols and communication and trying to infer things out of that and maybe even trying to get in there and disrupt it a little bit perhaps. And so when get a chance to meet, we ought to talk about that sort of thing and do projects that are useful here in the local environment as well as with our Pacific Command partners and make something useful here that is good for all of us. And we can use our test range as part of the evaluation process. That's our sales pitch back to you. Anyway, John, thanks so much for coming on and explaining to our public this need and this really complex way that we have to satisfy that need. And if you can, can you bring Maya up and get her in the picture here and put her out on the show? Come on, they've invited you on. Where are you, Maya? Let's get this. Moses is running. He's got my name. There's Maya. Okay, Maya. Thanks very much for coming on, John and Maya. And we'll see you guys probably pretty shortly. Thank you. Okay.