Margarita Escobedo, a Catholic who goes to church at least twice a week and volunteers at the San Genaro church, says she would welcome the signal jammer in her parish, where cell phones are becoming a nuisance.
The Perfectjammer works by directing radio energy at the drone, disrupting the remote control link between the drone and the operator. The jammer operates at common industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency bands. 2.4 GHz, one of the most common drone control frequencies, is part of the ISM band.
In the future, while we will hopefully never fight Russia or China, we almost certainly will fight someone who has bought advanced jamming and electronic warfare systems from them or even some of our own allies, said Tom Greco, Gen. Perkins’ chief of intelligence: “It is not a stretch to say that just about any capability that we have has the potential of being disrupted.”
According to the brief description provided by Tasnim, the drone cell phone jammer can lock onto an enemy drone, and then “disrupt its operation or even hack the aircraft and force it to land safely.” More pictures of the weapon are available at a Tasnim gallery.
While we don’t know more about this particularly anti-drone antenna/rifle yet, we’ve seen other similar designs. The Battelle Memorial Institute built an anti-drone antenna that mounts to a rifle, and called it the “DroneDefender.” A more recent version of that weapon was spotted deployed in Iraq earlier this year. In November, drone jamming company Drone Shield unveiled the DroneGun, a similar antenna-rifle with a backpack power supply. The whole effect looked a little bit Ghostbusters in appearance.
Since 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and moved into eastern Ukraine, several reports and military assessments have warned of growing Russian EW capabilities. These include airborne jammers that reportedly disabled electronics on a U.S. destroyer in the Black Sea, radar signal jamming of aircraft, GPS jamming of drones and disruption of military communications in Ukraine.
Observers note that Russia is using its EW capabilities as a tool of asymmetric warfare, countering expensive weapons like a U.S. Navy destroyer with cost-effective jammers and other EW systems. According to an unconfirmed account published in a Russian newspaper, a Russian SU-24 fighter using the new Khibiny EW system was able to turn off key elements of the U.S. destroyer’s Aegis Combat System, including its radar and data transmission network.