Radio jamming

This article aims to clear up some myths about electronic warfare (EW), particularly as it pertains to radio jamming. EW is a really complex subject which people have a bad habit of skipping over. They don't take the time to understand any of the details, but that doesn't step them from having all kinds of wildly unrealistic expectations. Military morons love to write breathless articles about radio jamming, and how it will allow 'our guys' to dominate the electronic battlefield. They like to bluster about how their cutting edge equipment will effectively neutralise the enemys ability to communicate by radio, without exception and without the possibility of counter-measure. Unfortunately, reality hardly ever bears out these flights of fancy. Before you can make any sortof predictions like that, you need to know the specifications of enemy radio sets, and the specifications of your own EW equipment. You also need to know the basics about radio engineering. First off, the range of an emitting radio depends on its frequency, power output, antenna type, and how clear its line of sight (LOS) to the receiver is. Second, these factors heavily influence your sides ability to actually detect the enemys comms and triangulate them. If they are using low power backpack sets in the confines of a forest, and your receivers are located miles away on top of a mountain thats getting alot of interference, then you're not even going to be aware of their presence.

Line of sight (LOS) is a very important

factor in radio communications

Lets use a less extreme scenario that puts you and the enemy on flat grassland, with a good LOS to each other. [1] They are carelessly using an omnidirectional antenna that your receivers can actually detect. What happens then? If you have something like a AN/TLQ-17 jammer, it can find the emitting radios position, match its emission frequency, and bathe the surrounding area in white noise. As a result, nearby radios will have their reception disturbed and won't be able to receive any signals. Does this mean that they are no longer able to communicate with each other? Not at all. If the enemy becomes aware of jamming, they can re-orient the antenna to try and lessen interference, and if that fails, switch to a backup frequency and issue a briefing message. [2] Both the emitter and receiver can then relocate to a different position, somewhere less prone to interference, to continue sending radio messages to each other. Keep in mind, this ignores the possibility that enemy radios may actually be able to defeat the jamming through brute force! They can do this by keeping the distances between emitter and receiver short, by using radio repeaters, or by cleverly using antenna masking. So even in ideal situations where you have flat terrain, good signal to noise ratio, and a high concentration of jammers, a competent enemy can bypass persistent attempts at jamming.

That last point (about the number of jammers in an area) is quite important, because the enemy may have many different radio sets communicating on many different frequencys at once. Going after all of them presents a workload so high that impractical, broad spectrum jamming will be needed. [3] And if the enemy is a real jerk, he might develop a habit of triangulating your jammers, finding their position, and bombarding them with artillery. This would force you to keep them many miles behind friendly lines for safety, reducing their effective radiated power. Thats very undesirable when the enemy uses AM radios, which do not distinguish noise and interference from the true signal, and make the task of jamming them alot harder (since you need to completely saturate the receivers with white noise). At such a great distance, your jammers will have a reduced area of dominance, and might not be able to reliably blot out their communications. So again, people need to realise that electronic warfare is a complicated endeavor whose success is dependent on many variables, including how you and the enemy interact. Despite what military morons claim, you can't just press a button at divisional HQ that blots out all their comms on all frequencys. [4] Just like tanks or infantry units, your EW assets need to be deployed in the field in a manner that will enable them to succeed.

 Antenna masking is useful for evading

enemy receivers and jammers

Notes

[1] This ignores situations where the enemy needs to send only a single report over radio, as the messages brevity makes it impossible to stop. Instead, we'll focuses on the steady flow of radio traffic, and how well it can be disrupted.

[2] Thus enabling them to temporarily bypass the jammer, which needs a few seconds to analyse and match the new radio frequency being used.

[3] Broad spectrum jamming is best done with multiple jammers, rather than one by itself. After all, the larger the spectrum being jammed, the less power is available to create noise.

[4] Even with a high concentration of radio jammers, the enemy have ways of getting around this!

Note: Because of the length of their transmissions, the peculiarity of their signal, and power output, jammers are easily located and identified as targets for attack by suppressive fires.


Sources

The Infantry Battalion (Infantry, Airborne, Air Assault, Ranger)

Threat Handbook: Battlefield Survival and Radioelectronic Combat

Operator's and Organizational Maintenance Manual: Radio Set AN/GRC-143

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