Rumor Mill News Reading Room Archive

More fungus among us-- DARPA program can selectively block personal cell phones, wireless internet, gps--

Posted By: Watchman
Date: Monday, 31-Aug-2009 09:01:50

a personal blackout "cloud" -- This program would generate a communication jamming bubble which follows wherever you may go. US military researchers are looking to build networks of small, low-power transmitter boxes which together can perform "surgical jamming" of digital signals - shutting down cellphones and sat nav receivers within an area "on the order of a city block corner" The new initiative is called Precision Electronic Warfare (PREW). It comes, of course, from our old friends at DARPA, where it's their goal to give every double-edged sword a bleeding edge. According to DARPA, in hardware terms PREW would consist of "an ad hoc sparse array consisting of multiple airborne and/or ground nodes... robust, low cost, small size, weight and power distributed platforms". Each PREW node would be equipped with a highly-accurate clock synchronised with those aboard its fellows, perhaps one of the tiny ones developed for the Chip-Scale Atomic Clocks programme, and would probably be able to communicate with them as well. It would also have "localisation" - ie a good idea of its location, presumably from GPS sat nav or some similar tech. All these would merely be enabling accessories, however, allowing the PREW radio-cloud to use its "energy transmission" capabilities with unusual precision. The 40-plus nodes would be able to point and focus their jamming power on an area perhaps 100m across - as DARPA says, a street corner - from as far as 20km without affecting reception in adjacent areas. Exactly what frequencies the PREW should be able to target is a secret, but DARPA offer a broad hint by saying that "target signals were chosen as representative of a range of signal classes, to include navigation, digital infrastructure-based communications, and digital non-infrastructure communications". Or in other words GPS sat nav, cellphone and CB-type radio bands. For the more technically savvy, here's the link-- https://www.fbo.gov/download/f3d/f3d24a4cc17130af66971e0d897baa87/PREW_BAA_24_Aug_09.pdf