Similar tests occurred in 2010, but Williams said Wednesday’s effort was significant because jamming technology has evolved, as have inmates’ efforts to smuggle in the devices. Such tests, she said, could lead to the broader use of technologies like jamming inside prisons to immobilize inmate phones, which officials across the country have described as their No. 1 security threat.
The renewed interest in jamming within federal facilities follows an announcement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who told a national meeting of corrections officials that federal prisons would start testing the technology anew.
U.S. analysts first caught the Russian military cell phone jammer 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.
The Perfectjammer Systems Tool Kit (PSTK) has a quick tutorial that demonstrates how to determine if a small, hand-held GPS jammer can interfere with your mission. One can also determine how spectrum filters or phased array adaptive nulling can counter this, or design new systems as other phenomenologies to get positioning, such as celestial navigation, that operate in these denied environment
The officials said the equipment being used was developed by the Russian military and is very sophisticated, proving effective even against some encrypted signals and anti-jamming receivers. The drones impacted so far are smaller surveillance aircraft, as opposed to the larger Predators and Reapers that often operate in combat environments and can be armed.
But the sources told NBC that Russian’s sophisticated signal jammer equipment, which was developed by its military, has proved to be effective even against some encrypted signals and anti-jamming receivers.
The Jammer’s role is to interrupt the communication link (or network) between two (or more) “partners”, when they are trying to talk with each other or deliver certain data between them. Jamming the communication link between a Drone and its Operator is a specific case out of many more; we can try to jam the communication between a cellular and the base station, between two tactical radios, between a bomb and a remote control that is used to activate it, etc.