Military jammer or transmitters that operate over public airwaves usually must gain approval of military, Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Aviation Administration, which makes training exercises with such devices problematic, often limiting their use to the wee hours of the morning.North Korea is apparently active jamming GPS signals using truck-mounted systems that overrun signals coming from tracking satellites. South Korea is unable to pinpoint the locations of these jammers because the Army runs them for about ten minutes at a time and then moves them.
The drone was likely targeted with a 4G jammer, which simply consists of a device equipped with a radio transmitter that can output multi-band frequencies. The drone’s receivers are then saturated, and it can no longer interpret instructions from the person flying it. The UAV fell into the sea, and according to Fstoppers, the city of Toulon has opened an investigation into the matter and has divers searching for the wreckage to further study it.
As it stands now the Navy’s principal airborne electronic attack systems relies on technology developed in the 1970’s: While the service has switched from the old EA-6B Prowler to the new EA-18G Growler as its electronic attack aircraft, the actual radar-jamming systems on the aircraft are largely the same. Service leaders are worried that with rapid advances by China and Russia in electromagnetic warfare will put their pilots at a major disadvantage, sooner rather than later.
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.Those antennas would be harder to jam due to directionality, but you’d have to consider the difference in power outputs too. Is a 50W 4G jammer 10km away going to trump an antenna transmitting/receiving a 0.1W signal from 1000km away?
A small direct-inject jammer tested recently at the National Training Center in California can be programmed to simulate jamming of radio signals that are used for electronic detection during training scenarios, the Army said in a release. These small devices require less power than earlier direct-inject jammers, which makes for a perfect fit for training centers where approval for such electronically denied environments previously was difficult.