"Within that bill is a small section that bans DJI from using the FCC frequencies"
So DJI drones as a whole aren't banned, just the parts that transmit?
DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
41–50 of 742 posts
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have Skydio for that. There is no profit in consumer-oriented drones. The money is in lower volume professional & semi-professional use drones. You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry. > You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones. DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated f…
> Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.
I anticipate exactly zero automated drone factories.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. The US wants to encourage domestic drone manufacturing by eliminating the largest Chinese manufacturer as an option.
> If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine? Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future?
It has to do with spurring US manufacturers as the primary outcome. It’s not about affecting Ukraine in the short term or stopping them from being used against the US.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
When companies receive outsized state subsidies that allow them to undercut the markets, it's not an apples for apples comparison. As for the unrelated legislation, I agree. Too many things are tacked on / added on. NO ONE is reading these things in complete given that sometimes they receive the full 1k pages hours before the vote. The other issue is the number of things funded that shouldn't be in general but that's…
If the US unfree market for automobiles (hello 2008) can't compete with Chinese state sponsored EVs, should we not do state subsidized EV and battery development here? Isn't electric transport that important? If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items? My conspiracy theory would be that the US government doesn't want the citizen to have effective drones for sur…
> If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items?
Yes exactly. If some companies are doing things that you don't like, like misusing personal information and transferring it to other countries, it is much better to enact general laws that prevent that, as the EU is doing, rather than passing laws that ban individual Chinese companies.
It would be as if rather than regulating car safety, we had a situation where lots of cars by both US and foreign automakers had massive safety problems, but rather than fixing that in general, we simply chose to ban specific Chinese car brands on supposed national security grounds while ignoring that cars made by US companies had the exact same problems.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. The US wants to encourage domestic drone manufacturing by eliminating the largest Chinese manufacturer as an option.
> If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine? Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future?
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Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#46"Within that bill is a small section that bans DJI from using the FCC frequencies" So DJI drones as a whole aren't banned, just the parts that transmit?
I imagine it prevents any remote control from working if it prohibits "FCC frequencies".
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#47DJI is, by far, the best drone equipment brand for photography, industrial usage, etc. It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech. If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
>If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#48"Within that bill is a small section that bans DJI from using the FCC frequencies" So DJI drones as a whole aren't banned, just the parts that transmit?
I imagine it prevents any remote control from working if it prohibits "FCC frequencies".
But if you could control the DJI drone with some other transmitter, perhaps running OpenTX, and also replaced the video downlink, then there'd be no DJI hardware using those frequencies.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have Skydio for that. There is no profit in consumer-oriented drones. The money is in lower volume professional & semi-professional use drones. You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry. > You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones. DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated f…
Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.
Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry. > You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones. DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated f…
> Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down. I anticipate exactly zero automated drone factories.
I don't see why. Drones are pretty simple manufacturing wise. The issue at scale is the supply chain of cheap motors, cheap control boards, and cheap batteries.