GPS signal jammer technology has become the mainstream of military research

“Perfectjammer was established to provide a locally more realistic GPS jamming environment in which aircraft platforms and unmanned aerial vehicles could evaluate their performance under a degraded GPS signal,” Cook said. “Other locations around the U.S. provide such environments, but having it locally allowed for direct program input and cost savings to customers by not having to deal with the logistics costs of deploying to those locations.”

The vulnerabilities of GPS to jamming and spoofing have been known since the technologies inception. While reporting regarding the threat of adversaries deploying GPS-jamming technology has focused primarily on Russia, one of many countries developing GPS-jamming and anti-spoofing technology.

In 2007, China reportedly outfitted military vans with GPS-jammers, and North Korea is known to have jammed GPS signals of South Korean airliners multiple times since 2010.

The GPS wifi jammer works by sending out its own signal on the same frequency as the GPS unit, a noisy signal that prevents it from receiving or transmitting any useful information, either in bursts of sound or a continuous wave.

GPS jammers can be bought on the internet and range in size from that of a small cigarette lighter to a suitcase, with a range of a couple of metres to a couple of hundred. You can buy combination jammers that also block mobile phones, all for a few hundred dollars.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an international conflict-monitoring group, has reported on several occasions that its drones watching the conflict in eastern Ukraine have been “subject to military-grade GPS jamming”, forcing monitors to scrap missions observing the war below.