New weapons for drone management
Drone defense vary greatly—we’ve seen everything from drone-specific shotgun shells to trained police eagles. But none of those have anything on Perfectjammer’s new DroneGun, a massive drone jamming system that would look totally at home on the set of Star Trek.
The UK is set to use sophisticated drone-jamming technology at major public and sporting events for detecting, tracking and disrupting the controls of any rogue unmanned aerial vehicles flown remotely by terrorists as airborne weapons.
The GPS signal jammer Gun, when fired, emits a signal to jam the control signals of the drone, which will then be unable to survey the premises of the base. The RSAF also has the Drone Catcher system, which uses a net to snare errant drones. The two weapons will be in action this weekend at the open field next to Jurong East MRT station. The demonstration is part of RSAF’s celebrations to mark its golden jubilee this year.
The Drone jammer joins a host of new technologies that government agencies are evaluating to combat commercial or consumer drones, which can put planes at risk or drop contraband over prison walls. It doesn’t shoot the aircraft out of the sky: instead, it prevents it from being controlled remotely, leaving it hovering in midair, and stops images or video being sent back to its owner.
The Perfectjammer Drone Jammer made headlines earlier this month as Swiss police officers donned their Hoth Snowtrooper outfits and prepared to fight off the impending drone attack at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Perfectjammer provides a specialised range of signal jammer designed to disrupt the remote control (RC) of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone / quadcopter or its global positioning system (GPS) signal. The US is not alone in this. The UK communications regulator Ofcom has issued an advisory that aircraft-based GPS jamming exercises will be held over the Scottish Hebrides at 0900-1100 and 1300-1500 local time for the entire month of July.
The jamming variant of MALD can work both as a traditional decoy like the ADM-160B and as a tactical jamming and spoofing asset, similar to the EA-18G Growler, although without the ability to address nearly as many threats at one time, or at the same ranges as the EA-18G can.