Russian-made drone jammer reportedly have been successful in forcing down drones in the recent past. But that doesn’t mean America’s huge fleet of military UAVs is defenseless.
The ACMA spoke with approximately 100 truck drivers over the two-day period about GPS high power jammer and monitored the spectrum for potential jammer use. Truck drivers were given fact sheets about GPS jammers and were soon spreading the word on the radio about these devices. The monitoring conducted supported previous reports that GPS jammers were being used by some truck drivers.
Richard Langley, a professor of geodesy at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, said the jammers would also have a hard time interfering with an encrypted military GPS code broadcast at a frequency of 1227.6 MHz. But the jammers could interfere with signals broadcast at 1575.42 MHz, a band used by commercial GPS receivers. Such receivers could have been bought by individual troops, but the Army tried to derail that practice in January.
Indeed, in 2016 Muscovites and foreign journalists began to notice that when they drove around the Kremlin their GPS jammer devices showed their position as Vnukovo airport, around 30 miles away. Experts believe the phenomenon is caused by a Russian secret-services signal intended to disorient devices near the capitol building that navigate via GPS, most likely to protect the Kremlin.
The anti-drone gadget is a rifle-shaped portable drone jammer. The Mark II Dronegun will possibly disrupt drone operations by jamming command, control and communication frequencies but it certainly won’t disrupt humans who get in its way, according to Australian certification house EMC Technologies (no relation to the big tech firm of similar name).