The Army has revamped its primary infantry European training facility in Hohenfels, Germany, so that troops now face a hypothetical enemy armed with precision-guided munitions, rocket launchers and advanced electronic jammers — “all the things that the Ukrainians are encountering,” Hodges said.The cell phone signal jammer, developed by the Threat Systems Management Office at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., can be installed between the antennae and radio transceiver and programmed to produce various jamming signals.
Last month, L3 and a team of Northrop Grumman and Harris were selected to move forward from a field of four competitors that also included Raytheon and a Lockheed Martin and Cobham team, USNI News has learned. Soon afterwards, Raytheon filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office, arguing it should have been selected to move forward with the low-band jammer effort.
According to the report, the portable jammer equipment was developed by the Russian military and is sophisticated enough to affect even navigation equipment with anti-jam technology and good enough to affect encrypted communications, though encryption only makes it hard to get into the drone’s control systems or sensor output. The Department of Defense declined to comment on whether any drones had crashed as a result of the jamming
If the drone had appropriate programming to recognize a jamming scenario and a GPS signal on its launch position, it could presumably react and go back home?It’s very difficult to maintain wide spectrum RF jamming across a large area without an extremely large system that requires a large amount of power. It’s more economical to target certain frequencies that you might know an enemy would use, but that only works if they use those range of frequencies.
Known as MALD-X, the initiative is intended to demonstrate capabilities potentially applicable to the USN’s planned MALD-N stand-in jammer, and at the same time establish an upgrade path for the US Air Force’s (USAF’s) existing MALD-J inventory. Flight demonstrations were completed on 20 August and 22 August on the Naval Air Warfare Center’s Point Mugu range.