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
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.