FPV drones are actually pretty bad for combat use if opfor deploys even basic countermeasures like jammers. Using FPVs as suicide bombs means you need to get within literal touching distance of your target. The closer you get to a jammer, the greater it’s power and effectiveness.
Jamming commercial/recreational drones (operating in the 2.4ghz and 5.2-5.8ghz spectrum) is actually a lot harder in practice and nothing like the silver bullet most people see in the movies. Jamming airborn threats(either military or consumer) falls into 2 paradigms - wide area jamming or directional-targeted jamming at a specific threat.
When people think wide-area jamming, they usually envision something like a bubble that covers 100meters+ to 1km out at ground level. Anything less than <50m is ineffective because the momentum of a drone on a crash trajectory will still be enough to carry it close enough to a target where the blast radius of small munitions will be enough to do damage. So to throw RF interference out 100m+ you actually need a fairly powerful stationary jammer that throws out at least double digit watts of RF power. These kind of amplifiers are not cheap or easy to get because they are not mass produced because theres very few civilian and consumer applications for such powerful transmitters(the WiFI transmitter in your wireless router runs at <1W for instance). To run a jamming station capable of throwing RF power in the low hundred of watts across 3-4 frequencies to cover consumer drones, that will require running a stationary gas generator (or hooked up to a vehicle's running electrical system) running 24/7 to maintain 24/7 jamming coverage. And you would want to maintain a 24/7 jamming bubble because if your only means of detecting an incoming drone is audio/visual, by the time you hear it, it's probably too late. This is impractical to do in the Ukraine near or around the front lines mostly due to logistics like fuel, power and constant shifting positions, not to mention stationary RF sources throwing out hundred watts of RF power will make the station a big target for anti-adiation counterattacks.
For directional jamming - this was seen earlier in social media posts from both sides where you see infantry aiming plastic rifles-looking devices with battery packs and antennas on them at a specific aerial threat. These devices typically throw out a few watts of power, not enough to create a "bubble", but are directed at a specific airborne target to bring it down, so it focuses all its limited RF energy in a very narrow band for a distance up to a few hundred meters out. The problems with this jamming solution is that it's highly limited in scope and you'll need someone on station constantly doing visually or audio searching for drones. Also, this counter drone measure can be mitigated by a change in tactics by the drone operator by flying higher and faster, and making the jammer operator lose track of the drone. Spotting the drone is also a challenge since by the time you spot it, it's also too late by the time you get the directional jamming device. Another problem is spotting a small consumer type drone a couple hundred meters above ground level against a bright sun lit sky or in early morning/late evening with limited lighting is impossibly hard.
To be honest they cost like $1k for a full set including fpv goggles, there isn't anything super hightech inside of them and they are easy to mass produce, the only surprise should be why it took so long.
Basic DJI FPV drones clock in at $1k plus goggles, so your $1k drone is actually on the higher end of what such drones should cost since they are essentially consumables. ATGMs are the wrong comparison since those are designed to take out million dollar tanks, not line grunts.
From the reports I've seen in the Ukraine conflict, DJI drones like the Mavic and Air are mostly used for reconnaissance and spotting now. Actual suicide drones with munitions probably use the DJI FPV Air unit(or similar) for sending commands to the flight controller on the drone and the video transmission to the headset (goggles), but the air units are relatively cheap at a couple hundred dollars.
The goggles and transmitter are the more expensive components, but those are reusable across multiple drone bodies. The second biggest cost are the batteries, the bigger the battery - the larger load it can carry and further it can fly. This basically puts each suicide FPV drone at around 400-600 each, excluding the cost of the munition.
How easy is it for a fpv headset to switch drones maybe it's interesting to send 3 or 4 drones at once and then send them in one after each other to double or triple tap the enemy.
As easy as pairing a bluetooth headset to your phone. Actually, it's almost exactly the same process. As of now, each DJI goggle set can only pair with 1 drone at a time, thus only operate 1 drone at a time.
