What's UAV IMSI Catcher and its Advantages
What’s IMSI Catcher?
IMSI catcher, also known as cell-site simulator, or Stingray, is a surveillance tool that masquerades as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower.
These devices were originally used by the military to intercept terrorist phone calls and find out exact locations of targets. Nowadays, Police and Border Patrol units are heavily dependent on this system. Before this technology was made available, authorities had to contact the network service provider in order to track cell phones.
Currently, IMSI catcher is also commonly used by emergency security management departments for search and rescue. For example, during the rescue events of earthquake, firefighting, accidents in mountain or forest areas, IMSI catcher could be adopted to search and locate the victims in the areas.
What’s UAV IMSI Catcher?
UAV IMSI catcher is the combination of an IMSI catcher and a drone, i.e., the IMSI catcher is mounted onto a drone. As there is limitation on battery capacity, dimension and weight of the payload on a drone, the IMSI catcher module should be specially designed to be mounted to a drone. And there should be power and communication interface between the two for mission control and data transmission.
What’s the Advantages of UAV IMSI Catcher?
With the mobility of a drone, UAV IMSI catcher can bring a lot of benefits to users when executing a mission. Here below are the major advantages.
- Larger areas of mission execution.
It’s obvious that a drone can easily reach a height or depth that’s difficult or even impossible for human being to do, whether it being a multi-floor building in a populous area, mountain, forest or above an area in fire.
- High efficiency
A drone can fly at tens of kilometers per hour and search an area of 200㎡/s (searching speed of Hocell drone-mounted IMSI catcher). And actually, the 1st advantage has already indicated a major reason why an UAV IMSI catcher could be much more efficient. For example, a suspected criminal might be hiding in one of many buildings in a populous area, with drone-mounted IMSI catcher, much less time would be taken to locate the criminal than with a portable one.
- Higher success rate of a mission
Time is critical for either law enforcement action or search and rescue mission. Longer time of searching, locating and reaction means danger to the lives of victims. A suspected criminal might have escaped from surveillance before being tracked. People buried in an earthquake might lose their lives if they are not found at the earliest possible time.
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