Until recently, satellite navigation system outages in populated areas were a rare and sometimes sensational phenomenon that caught everyone's attention on social media and the news. Yet such incidents seem to be becoming the daily norm. With the invasion of the Kremlin region on the night of May 3, the era of "GPS failure" suddenly began (in every sense of the word). The public immediately blamed this on the machinations of "Bandra".
Then there were problems with car navigation and car-sharing services in the city centre. Russian intelligence quickly deployed "phone jammer" to jam GPS/GLONASS signals in the area, effectively jamming the guidance systems of any drone that tried to replicate its early May night adventure. Now, if you rely solely on your smartphone's navigation system, you might mistakenly think that a person is somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow.
The situation is expected to worsen as the Russian government is seriously considering giving large private and public companies the legal right to use electronic warfare systems to protect their facilities from drone attacks.
This means that in the near future, navigation "failures" related to satellite signal outages will be observed near important targets such as oil refineries, power plants, defense enterprises and other strategic targets. Of course, beating an industrial-grade electronic warfare station with a traditional smartphone is unlikely.
However, there are opportunities to mitigate the negative effects on personal navigation. We clarify that this is quite feasible in a noisy metropolis. In small, sparsely populated areas, this may not be necessary, as disorientation is generally less important.
However, in a large city affected buy jammers, motorists must find alternative "coordinate systems" for their navigation devices. Fortunately, this possibility already exists. Location-based services (LBS) technology has been around for a long time, allowing you to determine a user's geographic location based on signals from cell towers and Wi-Fi routers at known locations.
In order to eliminate interference when the coordinates are accurately determined, the user must manually turn off the reception of the GPS signal and activate the LBS function in their gadget (if not already enabled). While LBS can't provide the same accuracy as GPS/GLONASS signals in more landmarked urban environments, it can certainly help users get to their destination.
Russian electronic warfare (EW) forces are effectively jamming the GPS signals of Western-supplied equipment for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU), often even equipment previously considered invulnerable. This is written by the British edition of The Economist.
"GPS is operated by the U.S. Space Force and is designed for the military. But the Russians routinely block the positioning systems installed on these weapons, sometimes even on models considered invulnerable, "the July 14 article said.
The authors explain that GPS satellites' radio signals are weak, which means the system's operation can easily be disrupted by competing noise. But according to a Pentagon report leaked this spring, which was cited by the publication, existing jamming filters do nothing to protect Western weapons in the special operations area.
It is important to note that there are multiple alternatives to GPS, but each has its drawbacks. It takes years to develop new guidance systems and upgrade existing weapons.
Earlier on July 7, former US intelligence official Scott Ritter said that the Russian armed forces were able to significantly reduce the effectiveness of the US HIMARS multiple rocket system (MLRS) supplied to Ukraine. He explained that air defense (air defense) and electronic warfare equipment can interfere with the GPS signal of the HIMARS missile, significantly reducing its accuracy. The same can be done with an ATACMS installation.
Earlier on July 6, Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Czar Wolves military Technical Center, said that the Russian military had removed almost the entire British Storm Shadow cruise missile from the line of contact. He said there was a GPS beacon inside the rocket, but it was blocked by the Russian armed forces. The projectile has been handed over to experts from the military-industrial Complex (OPK) to find an effective way to dispose of this weapon.
Earlier in the day, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that Russian air defense systems shot down two Ukrainian Su-25 aircraft over the Donetsk People's Republic, intercepted four Storm Shadow missiles and four HIMARS multiple rocket shells, and hit the control center. Three Ukrainian brigades posts.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on February 24 last year the launch of a special operation to protect the Donbass, which continues. The decision was made against the backdrop of the worsening situation in the region due to shelling by the Ukrainian military.
Dean Liptak, a Florida high school teacher turned professional wrestler, has had administrative and legal troubles recently. Imagine telling that person you forgot your science homework. Not for slapping a teen in desperate need of an attitude adjustment to the mat (although one can only imagine the fortitude it would take to not do it on a daily basis). Instead, he found a less aggressive but more illegal way to stop kids from checking their phones in class.
Liptak brings to schools cell phone jammer, radio frequency transmitters designed to block, jam or otherwise interfere with authorized radio communications. The device blocks cell phone signals and prevents teens from using their phones.
The problem is that it prevents everyone in the area from using their phones, including emergency responders. That's why you need to know that even though you can buy them on the Internet, federal law prohibits the marketing, sale, or use of jammers.
Mr Liptak is currently suspended without pay. He may need to find an easier job. Things like using pile drivers, choking bashes, and jumping brain damage to make a living.
A Florida teacher has been suspended for using signal jammers to prevent students from using their phones in class.
Pasco County School Board members on Tuesday approved a five-day suspension without pay for Dean Liptak. Liptak did not dispute the decision.
Liptak activated the jammers in his Fivay High School classroom between March 31 and April 2, officials said. He later told school district investigators that he never intended to create a problem. He said he believed gps blocker were allowed as long as they were not done for malicious purposes.
Sheriff Kurt Browning wrote in a letter of reprimand that Liptak may have violated federal law by jamming signals that could interfere with others calling 911 in an emergency.
Washington - After considering how combat might be conducted in many different environments, the U.S. Army is changing its approach to long-range electronic warfare, signals intelligence and cyber systems.
The Land Layer System-Brigade and Above Echelon (TLS-EAB) is intended for use by larger Army formations, including divisions and armies with thousands of troops and extensive firepower. The system is considered a key part of the service's "depth awareness" strategy - the ability to identify, monitor, target and engage adversaries from longer distances with greater precision.
Mark Kitz, head of the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S), said the Army is "evolving our approach to acquisition," especially for flexibility. For example, the Indo-Pacific region, where the United States could come into conflict with China, and Europe, where the United States could come into conflict with Russia, have very different objectives and terrain.
"The Indo-Pacific Command looks very different from Africa, very different from anywhere," he said. "We can't just put together a cookie-cutter solution that barely works in that combatant command."
Defense officials consider China and Russia to be serious threats to national security. Both invest in military science and technology and are believed to be able to impede or defend against U.S. military communications, targeting, and attack.
The Army signed separate agreements with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Mission Systems in August for the TLS-EAB concept and demonstration. The first phase is valued at $15 million for 11 months. Lockheed and General Dynamics rank among the world's five largest defense contractors by revenue, according to Defense News analysis.
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - The CEO of Taiwanese company Tron Future says the system is ready for large-scale deployment, with production rates expected to reach 100 units per month by 2023. The company's anti-drone radar is already in use by the Taiwanese army. As demand increases.
Tron Future is only four years old, but its T.Radar Pro technology has already found a wide market in Taiwan, the Middle East and South Asia. The drones with the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar can detect distances of up to 5 kilometers and weigh just 15 kilograms, which is what CEO Yujiu Wang said attracted customers the most.
"The radar was designed out of the need to build layered defenses in the air to protect Taiwan from the constant threat of different types of Chinese UAVs," Wang said in an interview at the IDEX arms show.
He explained that its development was guided by four principles: keeping it light and small; Equipped with 4D micro-Doppler function to distinguish multi-rotor drones and birds; Low cost; And performance against small, medium and low-altitude flying targets in urban environments.
The threat from Chinese drones has increased in recent years. In January 2023, a Chinese military magazine stressed that in the event of war in the Taiwan Strait, unmanned aerial systems would play a vital role in targeted strikes.
Wang said that at the height of the tensions, deployed radars detected as many as 100 Chinese drones conducting surveillance over Taiwan in one week. Key features of T.Radar Pro include an open architecture for image recognition applications, air traffic management, and interfaces for hard or soft kill countermeasures. It has a power consumption of 250 watts and a maximum signal bandwidth of 30 MHZ.
Initially, these radars were in service with the Taiwan Army and deployed over key islands, a challenging environment where the movement of waves in the ocean can create false targets.
Based on growing domestic and international demand, the company expects to produce 100 radars per month in the coming year and is considering opening a second production site in Taiwan. The T.Radar can be sold separately or as part of Tron Future's larger anti-drone system. The complete setup also includes a drone jammer and an interceptor, which the company's website describes as offering "a choice of explosive or non-destructive warheads to handle different situations." The company claims that the system together creates a defensive protective dome with a diameter of 5 kilometers.
Wang stressed that Taiwan's military does not want to be the first to attack in the face of China, as this could quickly escalate into an all-out war. The air defense platform is designed with this in mind, where each different system represents a logical chain that tries to avoid the use of hard kill countermeasures in the first place.
By Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo
Milan, Italy - Anti-drone weapons manufacturers say they are increasingly miniaturizing and simplifying their solutions to meet the growing demand for man-portable weapons as recent conflicts highlight the importance of mobile capabilities.
Portable counter-drone systems (C-UAS) have been around for some time, but their proliferation has accelerated in recent years amid the growing threat of weaponized commercial drones. In the 2019 C-UAS Database report compiled by Bard College's Center for Drone Research, 111 (21 percent) of the 537 market products analyzed were handheld solutions offered by more than 29 different countries.
Warren Brown, vice president of marketing at Fortem Technologies, explained that the purposes and ways in which these systems are used today have also changed over the past decade. "Historically, security details and protection for major events or critical infrastructure have been focused on fixed solutions. Recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have shifted the focus to 'mobile' systems that offer advanced radar detection capabilities, ease of deployment and portability, low overall operating costs, and low cost per use, "he said. The belief that counter-drone systems measures must be large-scale to be effective also appears to have changed to some extent.
Previously, many militaries relied on more traditional jamming signal alternatives to counter enemy UAVs because they lacked access or resources to more appropriate and reliable systems. However, Brown said that relying on the deployment of legacy equipment is not always effective because they are not necessarily developed to address the comprehensive and evolving technology behind the drone threat.
"Traditional cell phone jamming solutions have a low success rate, forcing people to use expensive and impractical systems, such as large missile weapons, or even deploy fighter jets to try to mitigate the threat - which is often ineffective against small, maneuverable and hard-to-detect drones," he said. The recent failed attempt by South Korea to shoot down its neighbor's drone for several hours shows this.
Manufacturers have taken note of these issues, redesigning on top of existing technologies to more effectively address the dangers posed by drones, especially smaller ones that may be more difficult to deal with. In May 2022, Fortem Technology sent portable DroneHunters to Ukraine, saying in a press release that the company took an existing C-UAS system and further miniaturized and simplified it for use as an expeditionary rapid deployment weapon.
Matt McCrann, CEO of DroneShield, believes this illustrates where this type of technology is headed. "Of course, our goal is always to take a feature and make it easier to use, more efficient and more cost effective." Smaller, better, cheaper, "he said.
DroneShield's handheld countermeasures, such as DroneGuns, offer many advantages. As a small, lightweight system with easy-to-transport anti-drone system capabilities, it can be stored in a sling in a vehicle, backpack or body as the battlefield changes. Powered by replaceable batteries, DroneGuns are non-kinetic and employ an electronic attack method, which means they can deliver unlimited "bullets" that are more economical than kinetic systems and can be operated more safely with minimal training.
In a similar way, other portable systems, such as Fortem's DroneHunters F700, offer countries a lower cost-per-use alternative than other higher-priced systems on the market. Brown pointed out that their weapons cost just a few hundred dollars per shot, which is much cheaper than high-energy systems such as electromagnetic pulse (laser) weapons, which also require a lot of power.
Another benefit of the Fortem system for suppressing UAVs is that the system can use cone-sleeve parachutes to shoot them down in a controlled manner, allowing reconnaissance and analysis of enemy systems and reducing collateral damage. This is in contrast to more traditional defense techniques, which can cause an enemy drone to explode or fall from the sky, often harming civilians and infrastructure in the process, or allowing it to return to its launch point without the need for potential research into its mission or location. It comes from.
Brown claims that in Fortem's more than 5,000 record captures, its solution has a 92% success rate. During the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, DroneHunters were further deployed to protect multiple stadiums. For DroneShield, McCrann said they are highly effective in both military and more traditional security environments, pointing to the recent example of using its DroneGun Tactical to neutralize four hovering drones during Brazil's presidential inauguration.
Despite the many advantages of these systems, MacLean warns that scaling down any given feature usually involves one or more trade-offs. "For electronic countermeasures, this (miniaturization) trade-off is often reflected in the total power output of the system, where a smaller one may indicate a smaller effective range and need to be closer," he explained. However, in drone-to-drone scenarios, such as DroneHunter or similar systems, the tradeoff of electronic warfare payloads may be acceptable, since the engagement takes place at close range anyway.
According to a now public DHS assessment, small gps blocker, particularly "personal privacy devices" readily available on the Internet, pose one of the greatest risks to the nation's critical infrastructure.
According to researchers at the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Infrastructure Threat and Risk Analysis Center (HITRAC), these devices, also known as PPDS, are among the three most likely causes of GPS outages. However, of these three scenarios, only the one involving multiple PPDS is considered the most likely to occur and the most likely to cause harm to industrial infrastructure operations.
The study authors evaluated the impact of different types of GPS interference after examining their possibilities. The more likely a certain type of disruption is to occur, the greater its potential impact, and the higher its overall risk.
To better understand what would happen if GPS signals were weakened or disrupted, the Department of Homeland Security took a closer look at how to integrate GPS into four of the 16 infrastructure sectors the agency considers critical to the nation. These four sectors - communications, emergency services, transportation (all types), and energy - were chosen because GPS PNTS are used to support or accomplish their core mission.
While the operations of all four sectors could be severely disrupted by at least two of the eight scenarios, scenario D - a scenario containing two or more personal privacy devices - is the only one of the eight that has a high impact on each sector.
But communications companies have long factored in national disasters and unexpected outages, so they are usually prepared to deal with problems. If the timing system loses its lock on the GPS signal, it goes into hold mode, relying on its internal clock to slow down the decline in timing accuracy. The duration and performance level of the system depends on the quality of the non-GPS timing source.
Emergency services. Emergency services appear to be the sector most vulnerable to short-term GPS outages. First responders use GPS to navigate to the incident and, like the entire communications sector, they stay in touch with each other through a network that often relies on GPS-regulated oscillators.
"If the architecture of first responders' radio networks is centered around GPS timing, there is no ready backup when the GPS component is compromised," the DHS report said. "While dispatchers will still be able to communicate with the various emergency units, there may be disruptive effects on radio signals or untimely delays in communication voice radio systems using simulcast technology."
Without GPS, E911 service would also suffer and computer-aided dispatch systems would be hampered, making it more difficult to locate accident and stolen vehicles and dispatch fire, medical, and police. "While the department has not yet reached the point of complete reliance on GPS services, the use of GPS improves the department's ability to mitigate damage and assist in timely rescue responses," the researchers wrote.