Using cell phone jammers is an almost inevitable trend

Almost everyone makes use of the mobile phones everywhere whether it is a theatre, educational institute, café, restaurant, office or any other place. People nowadays spend their most of time on mobile phones rather than spending a good time with their families or focusing on their organizational goals. Though mobile phones may help you in a number of ways, it has distracted many lives as well. This is where the cell phone network wifi jammer comes into the play. Jamming refers to the act of obstructing something and therefore mobile jamming refers to obstructing the network signals to reach your mobile phone and thereby denying the access to the internet, sending text messages or phone calls.

The state government had earlier allotted Rs 5 crore for procuring 12 mobile phone jammers to be installed in various central prisons to control the use of mobile phones by the prisoners. Two mobile phone jammers had already been installed at the Puzhal Central Prison.

It doesn’t appear that the drone was hit by a projectile or laser in its descent (though evidence of such would certainly change this analysis). Barring a physical projectile, the known non-kinetic methods for stopping a drone are threefold: radio frequency (RF) jamming, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) jamming, and spoofing. With RF GPS jammer, the link between the drone and its operator is severed, usually causing the drone to descend or return to home. With GNSS, the drone’s link to satellite navigation is lost, and the drone then usually hovers in place, lands, or returns home. With spoofing, the attacker feeds the drone new information to take control of its flight.

The prison authorities said the two mobile jammers would cover a vast area of the central prison premises and help control smuggling of mobile phones into the prison. Presently, 15,000 prisoners are lodged in various prisons across the state. Coimbatore central prison has more than 1,700 inmates.

None of these methods require any bright flashing lights, which could easily be a cosmetic feature of the counter-drone system. Given the drone’s sudden spiraling descent in the released video, it’s likeliest that the system featured is a radio-frequency jammer. It is also likely, given the system’s employment on the side of the Russian-backed separatists, that the system is another Russian-made electronic warfare weapon, fielded on the front lines of a proxy war as much for battlefield impact as it is for research and test purposes.