Once holidaymakers took off from here, but today an ex-Soviet airfield is a testing ground for ways to take down the drones increasingly buzzing through German skies.

Germany has been rattled by a spate of mysterious sightings of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), believed to be from Russia, over military bases, industrial sites and an airport.

Last week the government said it would give federal police the powers to blast them out of the sky.

But at the airstrip near the eastern city of Magdeburg, researchers of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have been testing more subtle options to deal with potentially hostile drones.

"The countermeasures used to defend against drones vary greatly -- they have to be tailored very precisely to the situation at hand," said Johann Dauer, who leads dron

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