For years, officials in state and federal prisons have spoken out about the dangers posed by cellphones in the hands of inmates, who can use them to continue their criminal endeavors behind bars, including drug trafficking, extortion scams, and even hits on witnesses and others.
According to the expert, signal jammer are starting to pop up in private businesses where they are used to “improve productivity in manufacturing and against corporate espionage”. The local Gunfighter Flag exercise held in mid-April led to unintended consequences after military jamming equipment used to train aircrews also blocked navigation signals used by local farmers, pilots and city workers.
A major source of the GPS jamming will be Red Flag 18-1, the first phase of the air war games staged every year from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, with events ranging as far north as the Seattle air traffic control area. Electronic warfare aircraft, including the Navy’s EA-18 Growler and the Air Force’s EC-130 Compass Call, will play a role in shutting down the satellite navigation system for everything within as large as a 450 nautical mile radius.
This is the time for one more important clarification. Usually, in the Anti-Drone application, the intention is to jam the Drone when it is hundreds of meters away from the sensitive area/perimeter (where the cell phone jammer is installed). For example, we want to jam a Drone, which is 300 meters away from the Jammer and flying at an altitude of 10 meters. As can be understood, in this case the diagonal distance between the Jammer and the Drone is about the same as the horizontal distance between them. Therefore, in order to simplify things, we will be discussing horizontal distances and we will not bother our selves with calculating the exact distance, because the difference is quite small.
Stirling, an outspoken advocate for some sort of technology to combat phones within prisons, wrote in June to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, beseeching the top prosecutor for help pursuing FCC permission to jam cell signals of the phones, which are thrown over fences, smuggled by rogue employees and even delivered by drone.
The recent reports out of Syria highlight the inclusion of these in an evolving battlespace. One of the simplest threats to drones is the blocking or scrambling its reception of a signal from a GPS satellite. This “GPS jamming” can produce serious operational impact on military mission and will likely become more and more prevalent. According to a piece by NBC, Russians are using GPS jamming against the U.S. military’s smaller surveillance aircraft.