A power bank and a device with a Kyivstar SIM card were found inside a downed Shahed. Russians are using Ukranian cell networks for positioning, and possibly to update flight paths.
Most of the time I would imagine you, as the target of one of these, has zero ability to affect change in where the drone lands except by shooting it down. I would guess that these drones either use inertial guidance so they know where they are in space because of where they started and where they turned plus how fast they flew plus the outside forces like wind acting on them.
So the only way you can change their course is by shooting them down prior to this.
The orcs just gave Ukraine a backdoor (which Ukraine has ultimate control over!!) into the flying drone!
Knowing this Ukraine attack these drones in a whole bunch of new ways.
locally spoofing cell tower locations (using a narrow "gun" type transmitter) so they could alter the course
identify the upstream server that the drone is using to communicate with, and "man in the middle" the conversation to change targets or order it to crash in safe places
in the most extreme, there's the outside possibility that Ukraine could commandeer a drone in flight on the way to a Ukrainian city and *give the drone a Russian target to attack instead!
If its used like the INU I had from GD to integrate, the INU is only supplemental to the guidance system. INUs drift surprisingly quickly in real life so I'd imagine it's used in conjunction with cell triangulation, satellite positioning, mems compass, manual input, etc so that when one drops out (jamming maybe) its circle of error (I forget the correct term) doesn't go big quickly.
Fun fact. An INU can figure out its position from an unknown one if its left stationary for a long time (1/2 a day iirc). Something to do with the rotation of the earth but the exact reason I forget.
They could, but implementing such a system would require the cell tower to measure a device's speed via the cell signal's time-of-flight, which would require reprogramming or replacing the tower's hardware.
And even that would only address half the issue, as the drones could still triangulate their position without connecting to them at all using nothing more than a table of cell tower locations.
These are launched from Russian territory, the cell towers can triangulate where a phone signal comes from. They just need software to cut off sim cards that start in russia and travel towards Ukraine