China's signal jammer equipment in the spratly islands

China appears to be moving forward with plans to use electronic attacks designed to either disrupt or take control of American drones. With reports that the Chinese attempted to interfere with U.S. military drones at least once in recent years, the country has shown a willingness to use GPS jamming to prevent U.S. aircraft from conducting surveillance missions in the Spratly Islands.

The Murmansk-BN is a world’s most powerful long-range electronic warfare (EW) system developed by KRET, part of Rostec Holding. The EW system are aimed at disrupting radio communications at a maximum range of more than 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles). The jammer is specifically geared at tackling high frequency communications systems, including the High Frequency Global Communications System.

Jamming weapon - efficient, accurate

Even if data is not extracted or changed, a jamming signal hitting interference bands could cause the transmitter to stay on a lot longer than it normally would. The accumulating effect would be to drain batteries much faster than anticipated so as to bring down a remote or buried link.

Developed by the Army Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), the combination of wireless communications-wifi jammer and hacker exploits of vehicle systems forces enemy tanks to "stop, dismount, get out of their protection, [and] reduce their mobility," as one Army observer described the ANTC training exercise at Fort Irwin, California.

Some of the jammers fielded during the initial years of the war, such as the vehicle-mounted Duke V2 and Warlock jammers, informed subsequent upgrades designed to defeat a greater range of threat signals. For instance, the Duke V3 vehicle-mounted jammer, now fielded on thousands of vehicles in theater, represents a technological improvement in capability compared to prior systems, Ryan explained.

Cell jammers are devices used to prevent and block cellular signals, primarily in mobile phones. They’re often used to disrupt signals in locations where silence is expected or where using a phone would be impolite or rude.

Electronic Warfare Jammers need to analyze wide bandwidths with low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) to detect critical, time sensitive threats. One way to achieve this is to channelize the wide bandwidth to separate signals of interest from noise and interferers through a filter bank and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).