GPS signals make use of a definite and specific frequency. GPS works at two main frequencies. The one is intended for non-military or public use at 1575.42 MHz and the other one is meant for military purpose at 1227.6 MHz. Actually, GPS is based on radio waves.
Overall, using the GPS can be very useful, such as car navigation, finding missing persons and navigating in the sea. Even so, there are many different ways to misuse the GPS, and that is why we have the GPS jammer.
That even state intelligence services have had difficulty in determining the source of the jamming and whether or not it was deliberate, highlights how effective these tactics can be even during an uneasy peace. With electronic and cyber assaults, Russia has found an effective way to disrupt the military and government activities of its regional opponents while maintaining a surprising amount of plausible deniability.
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-enabled location services.
Russia has very advanced capabilities to disrupt GPS. Over 250,000 cell towers in Russia have been equipped with GPS jamming devices as a defense against attack by U.S. missiles. And there have been press reports of Russian GPS signal jammer in both Moscow and the Ukraine. In fact Russia has boasted that its capabilities “make aircraft carriers useless,” and the U.S. Director of National Intelligence recently issued a report that stated that Russia and others were focusing on improving their capability to jam U.S. satellite systems.
The fact that in both cases the GPS location showed up as an airport seems to point to something else – Russia has developed its cyber-warfare capacity to cause GPS satellite navigation systems to lie, perhaps to protect its airports from enemy drone and missile attacks.
For a radio jammer to work, it needs to be fairly close to the signal its crew wants to disrupt. The Avtobaza, for one, can detect targets up to 93 miles away, according to Air Power Australia, 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.