We have just seen 2 British military helicopters flying over in England and had an odd occurence. Tried to film them with my phone to show my 10yo son (who is really into military stuff). The phone recorded video and voice clearly up until I managed to get the camera focussed on each aircraft in turn. Then the screen and audio goes fuzzy and blank. EDIT - on further checking the sound is audible but the image is blank. At this point I was pointing the phone up at the aircraft in open air - no building or car in the way.
Audio and video resumes when I moved the camera away from the craft to switch the camera off. Any military pedes know if it could be some sort of jamming signal or countermeasures? If so is it odd that this would be deployed on a sunny day in a non hostile area? There’s been a lot of aircraft flying about for the last couple of weeks (chinooks and lynx and sea kings) and have not had any probs filming them before... 🤔 Almond status - ACTIVATED
No. I didn’t try to as I just went straight to video to film them for our son - he’s mad about military stuff and loves stuff like this. They were flying in staggered formation out over the river.
What model of phone? I could imagine a modulated IR signal or something like that that the phone camera processor software is designed to look for and shut down.
It’s an iPhone 11, it was so weird cos I could clearly see them on the screen
That actually pretty consistent with this theory. This would be implemented at a higher layer than raw video output and maybe just blocks video encoding.
Did it seem to cut out only when you pointed towards the helicopter?
Looking at the specs for iphone 11 the camera has "truedepth" which is an IR dot projection scheme for recovering depth... which means it has an RGBIR sensor that can separate IR from red. Which means the system can process an IR signal that is not visible in the RGB video.
If these birds fly by routinely it would be interesting to try to capture video using an IR sensitive camera like a webcam that supports "night mode" and has IR illumination. Ideally at night when there wouldn't be a signal from sunlight.
Hey what do you know
https://9to5mac.com/2016/06/28/apple-patent-infra-red-block-photos/
Oooh interesting.
Very cool sight to see them fly like that. I still run outside and look up every time I hear a loud chopper and I'm mid 30s. We took our son to a Air museum many years ago and it was awesome. Had a trip planed to go back last year but Covid stopped that.
It is cool. My son loves military stuff and history and was blown away yesterday as he saw 2 fighter jets fly over head. There’s been a lot of activity in the area over the last couple of weeks with aircraft at the local RAF airfield and the nearby army camp. It’s reportedly a training op but there is way more traffic than we’ve seen with previous training things over the years. I mean they’ve even opened the camp to the public at the end of a training event a few years back so you could go look at the helicopters. Talking to a friend about it now abs they mentioned something about there being large scale emergency services training drills with crisis actors by where she lives (about 5 miles away). We’ve not heard anything about that one though..
I take it you are living down south and east, Near Salisbury area?
Nope North West