GPS jamming technology can also be used to manage drones. Professor Todd Humphreys and his team have taken control of an unmanned drone through a GPS spoofing technique at Austin. They used tiny helicopters to disrupt the GPS systems on unmanned aircraft, and then to provide coordinates for drones to move towards their given targets.
It’s not the first time a drone’s vulnerability has been exposed, it’s easy to buy a signal jammer on the Internet, and then force a drone to crash or other operations. And this signal interference is effective for all unmanned aircraft.
Competing GPS jamming technologies
The famous davos economy forum has used similar devices to regulate the use of drones, to protect order and safety. Such equipment has played an important role in the success of recent conferences.
The US military has declined to confirm whether any of their drones have crashed as a result of the Russian jammers citing operational security. Despite US drones being equipped with anti-cell phone jammer technology, NBC quoted US officials stating that Russian disruption technology was “very sophisticated, proving effective even against some encrypted signals and anti-jamming receivers.” The Russians began jamming some smaller U.S. drones several weeks ago, the officials said, after a series of suspected chemical weapons attacks on civilians in rebel-held eastern Ghouta. The Russian military was concerned the U.S. military would retaliate for the attacks and began jamming the GPS systems of drones operating in the area, the officials explained.
U.S. analysts first caught the Russian military jamming drones in eastern Ukraine four years ago, after the invasion of Crimea, according to Humphreys. He said the jammers were initially detected as faint signals from space, bouncing off the earth’s surface. The jammers “had a pretty significant impact” on the United Nations surveillance drones that were attempting to monitor the area, grounding the fleet for days and halting intelligence gathering from the air.