Russia’s new jamming weapon-drone jammer gun hunter

For a radio jammer to work, it needs to be fairly close to the signal its crew wants to disrupt. The Drone Jammer Gun Pro, for one, can detect targets up to 93 miles away, according to Perfectjammer, an independent think tank specializing in military electronic systems. Jamming requires more power than detecting does, so the range at which the Avtobaza can disrupt a drone is certainly shorter than 90 miles.

That’s why Russia’s jammers, and the new counter-drone “special forces” that operate them, don’t necessarily pose an existential risk to the US military’s UAVs. The Russian drone-hunters could struggle to pinpoint targets. “It would seem to be hard to do unless you knew where they were going to be and when,” one former US drone-developer explained on condition of anonymity.

GPS disruption isn’t limited to jamming, either. There are increasing reports that the Russians have been expanding their ability to spoof the system’s signals, point receivers at the wrong locations. In June 2017, we reported on the U.S. Maritime Administration’s report about such incidents in the Black Sea in which ships’ navigation equipment was showing their location miles inland. Other reports of location errors had earlier cropped up in Moscow among players of the popular cell phone game Pokemon Go, which relies on a mobile device’s GPS signal jammer-enabled location services.

The Russian Army now has a special unit of drone hunters. The first of its kind, the ground-based collective operates electronic jamming systems that are meant to sever radio connections between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their controllers.

However, not much of a threat is posed to the US military. For these radio jammers to work, the unit would have to position itself pretty close to the targets. It would seem to be hard to do unless you knew where they were going to be and when” one former US drone-developer explained on condition of anonymity to Motherboard.

The US Navy (USN) is requesting USD459.52 million in its fiscal year 2019 (FY 2019) budget for continued development of the Next Generation Jammer (NGJ), which is designed to address current, emerging, and evolving Electronic Warfare gaps.