As drones rise, so does counter-drone technology. While there are a variety of potential drone defense solutions, including surveillance equipment such as radars, radio frequency analyzers, or acoustic and optical sensors, as well as high-power microwave devices (HPMs), drone networks, and lasers, there is another Solution A hot topic in the drone industry recently: drones interfering with GPS.

Many drones (as well as other technologies such as transportation and freight fleets, and even smartphones) rely on GPS for navigation and tracking. But some criminals are trying to jam these GPS signals.

InfiniDome is an Israeli GPS security company founded in 2016 that produces a variety of products, but its main focus is on developing GPS signal protection systems. This summer, Infinidome published a white paper that clarified how drone gps jamming works and provided a very sobering demonstration of how vulnerable GPS systems (GNSS) are to jamming attacks.

You can download and read infiDome’s full GPS interference white paper here. I use it to give a quick overview of the most important things you should know about drone GPS interference. Here are the reasons why people try to jam drone GPS signals, how to jam them, and what to do about them.

Why does drone interference occur and why is it a problem?

There are many reasons why people would want to jam a drone’s GPS signal, including defense applications to prevent enemy drones from getting lost or crashing. While drones are used in systems such as aerial surveillance to catch drug traffickers, drug cartel criminals use drone jammers to prevent this from happening. In fact, Mexico reports that jamming was used in 85 percent of all recorded truck thefts, according to the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a science and education nonprofit based in Virginia. device. The foundation aims to protect critical infrastructure through technologies such as InfiniDome.

This isn't just about large military or serious legal use cases. A drone light show over a shopping mall in Zhengzhou, China, fell from the sky after someone used a drone jammer, putting 5,000 spectators at risk.

In short, even if you don’t necessarily believe there is an obvious enemy trying to destroy your drone, it’s crucial to be prepared for a drone GPS jammer attack. This also happens with drone light shows.

Jamming drone may not be all bad

This is not to say that all drone interference is necessarily bad or evil. In fact, it may sometimes be considered the opposite. The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, turned to counter-drone company Dedrone to help work on drone jammers to ensure unwanted drones aren't flying near airports and posing a safety risk to flights full of passengers. The Department of Defense also uses drones to protect secret areas or other locations that require security. InfiniDome created a video about drone interference (which also serves as an ad for their product), which you can watch here:

How does drone GPS jamming actually work?

So how does drone GPS jamming actually work?

The GNSS receiver used by the drone GPS jammer uses GPS signals (along with GLONASS, Galileo and other constellations - hence the name "GNSS" - Global Navigation Satellite System), but is known to be vulnerable to attack and easily jammed regardless of There is intentional interference - but often even unintentional interference occurs (like you may have experienced while driving through a tunnel in a mountain, or sometimes even in certain areas of your home where cell phone blocker reception is interrupted).

Purchasing jamming equipment is easy and cheap. You don’t need an entire mountain to block GPS signals—you can find GPS jamming device online for less than $100. As long as the jammer is able to emit a stronger signal on the same frequency as yours, it will gain the upper hand and jam your drone.

Of course, it’s not that simple. There are all sorts of jamming attacks and signals, including Continuous Wavelength, where a single frequency is jammed and anything transmitted in that same frequency will be blocked. And with another method called narrow band, power is spread and diluted throughout the different frequencies making up a band (a range of around 2MHz). To attack, jammers “barrage” the bad by creating a series of narrow-band signals that transmit shortly one after each other.