Jamming the Signal

What does it mean when a signal is "jammed?" From radar to radio to some cheeky broadcast TV signal intrusions, we look at how signal jamming works. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts, and how the
tech are you? You know, there's this classic scene in
Mel Brooks's documentary film space Balls, in which a radar

(00:27):
operator aboard the bad Guy's spaceship announces that he has
lost the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps. Why because
the radar has been jammed Raspberry jam to be specific,
and there's only one man who would Dare give Darth
Helmet the Raspberry. But I'm ARII getting sidetracked. I thought
I would do a short episode about signal jamming and

(00:50):
signal intrusion and broadly how it works, maybe a few
interesting examples. So let's get the bare basics out of
the way, because it's actually really simple. Signal jamming occurs
when someone uses a transmitter to send out signals over
certain radio frequencies at a strength powerful enough to interfere
or overwhelm communications equipment in the area. We can use

(01:13):
an analogy here. It's kind of like trying to have
a conversation with someone in a really loud environment. Like
let's say it's a really loud party and you're just
trying to chat with somebody, and every time you or
your friend talks, the noise in the space just gets
louder and you can't hear one another. There's too much
noise not enough signal. That's essentially what's going on with

(01:35):
signal jamming, except we're talking about electromagnetic or specifically radio signals.
No raspberries are involved, sadly. Now, let's really get stuck
in by talking quickly about the origins of radio, simply
so that we can kind of have a working understanding
what's going on here. So the full story of the
history of radio is a really long, complicated one, with

(01:57):
lots of important scientists and engineers who made discoveries that
led up to our ability to make radio transmitters and
receivers and that kind of stuff. I'm not going to
do the full rundown. I've done it before in other episodes,
but here's just sort of like the highlights. So James
Clerk Maxwell's first stop in the mid nineteenth century. Like

(02:18):
the eighteen sixties, Maxwell proposed a hypothesis that later developed
into the theory of electromagnetism. He believed that with an
oscillating electric or magnetic field, one could generate electromagnetic waves
that are capable of traveling outward from the source through space.
You didn't need wires or any other kind of connection.

(02:38):
You could just beam this energy, which was a pretty
radical idea at the time, but it was a radical
idea that would turn out to be correct. So about
twenty years after Maxwell had published his mathematical equations explaining electromagnetism,
there was a German scientist named Heinrich Hertz, and he
created an interesting setup to test the idea of these

(03:00):
electromagnetic waves. Hertz created what ended up being a very
simple radio transmitter. So he had a pair of metal
plates that had these little metal balls extending from them,
and he put the two metal balls so that they
were close to each other, but not actually in contact
with each other, so there was a gap between the
two balls, and they connected to an oscillating power source,

(03:25):
so alternating current. In other words, the current would go
in one direction, then reverse and go the other direction,
and would do this many times per second. So the
power source meant since it was alternating, it meant that
the polarity of the two balls was alternating too, and
if you had a great enough difference in voltage between
these two balls, it would induce a spark to jump

(03:47):
from one ball to the other. It had to be
a great voltage to do that. If it's too low voltage,
then you get a charge build up, but it's not
enough for the charge to discharge. Right now, the fact
that it was an oscillating current that was going back
and forth and reversing this polarity, in the words of
star Trek, meant that the spark would actually oscillate too.

(04:07):
They would go like from left to right and then
right to left, and left right and right to left,
so it was zapping back and forth. Next, Hertz set
up a length of wire and at the end of
each end of this length of wire he put another
metal ball, and he bent the wire into a loop.
And the two metal balls were close to each other,

(04:28):
but still having a gap between them, but you know,
they were on either end of this loop. He put
this loop close to the oscillating power source where the
balls were sparking, so again not in contact, but close
to those first pair of balls, and this loop with
the second pair of balls Once it got close enough,
sparks started to go between those two balls too, so

(04:52):
the balls which were not in contact with the power
source were also sparking, and what Hurts had created was
a simple spark gap transmitter. Hertz's experiment was the first
radio transmission in history. Now, this kind of radio transmission
covers a broad span of radio frequencies, right, This isn't

(05:12):
something that was tuned to a particular band. It was
just kind of blasting out a raw signal of noise
across effectively the entire radio spectrum. Other folks like Marconi
and Tesla would make improvements in Hurtz's basic design and
allow for wireless signaling. But the early days of wireless
communications were really primitive. You were broadcasting a very simple

(05:36):
series of signals. Essentially, you were either blasting out noise
or you weren't blasting out noise. So you can blast
out noise in tight patterns, such as in Morse code,
and then you could send meaningful communications. But that was
about it. These broadcasts were also public, right, anyone who
had a radio receiver would be able to pick up
those transmissions. So wireless in the early days was not

(05:58):
suitable for any sort of communication of a sensitive nature,
because anyone with a radio receiver who was within transmission
range would be able to hear the message. One smarty
pants who worked on this problem was Sir Oliver Lodge.
Now I should probably do a full episode about him
at some point because he was a really quirky dude.
So on the one hand, he was pushing back the

(06:21):
boundaries of ignorance, right he was exploring radio and a
time when we were just starting to get a handle
on it. But on the other hand, he was also
a believer in the paranormal. He was a spiritualist. So
I think it's an interesting dichotomy there, right, Like you've
got a person who is fundamentally adding to our scientific

(06:43):
understanding of a new technology, and on the other hand
he believes in ghosts. Anyway, in the late eighteen hundreds,
Sir Oliver presented a paper on using special radio transmitters
and receivers that would be tuned to work in specific
bands of radio frequencies, so instead of blasting out a
signal across essentially all radio frequencies, these devices would only

(07:07):
work within this relatively narrow band. Now, Marconi had developed
a similar technology and the two of them got into
kind of a patent dispute over the matter, with Marconi
wanting to put his tuning technology to use, but it
was infringing essentially on Sir Oliver's patent. So ultimately they
were able to settle their dispute, and Marconi bought Sir

(07:31):
Oliver's patent and gave a good old alie and honorary
title with the Marconi Company, though as far as I know,
Oliver never actually did a day's work over at Marconi.
Tuning would mean you could send a radio signal across
a specific frequency, and radios tuned just to that frequency
would be able to pick it up. But this also
meant you could send signals across lots of different frequencies simultaneously,

(07:54):
and those transmissions wouldn't interfere with one another, because if
you had a radio that you could similarly tune, it
would pay attention to a specific set of frequencies and
ignore everything else. Right, So if I needed to receive
a message on one frequency band and you needed to
receive one in another frequency band, and we happen to
like live next to each other, we could each tune

(08:14):
our respective radios into our respective radio frequencies and receive
those messages without worrying about them getting mixed up. Now,
I'm going to skip over eight ton of radio history
at this point because we don't really need to have
a deep understanding of how radio signals work to get
to the jammy bits. And besides, like I said, I've
done several episodes about the history and evolution of radio

(08:36):
in the past, so no need to go over all
of that material. It's the same like people have traveled
back into the past and changed the history of radio,
so no need to go through it. If they did,
I'm sure that the Tesla fans would have made sure
Tesla got his due. Anyway. The radio tuning thing, along
with signal modulation like amplitude modulation and then frequency modulation,

(09:01):
these would become important components for transmitting broadcasts with sound,
as would be manipulating an oscillating signal. Right, a standard
consistent oscillating signal. Amplitude modulation you you, obviously you manipulate
the amplitude of that wave frequency. You modify the frequency
within certain parameters. You can't modify the frequency, you know,

(09:24):
all higlidy piglidy. You have to do it within the
bandwidth of that frequency band. But this meant you didn't
have to blast out as signal and just use Morse
code or something similar to get your point across. You
could actually speak or I don't know, you could. You
can blast out Abbas' greatest hits if you wanted to. Okay,
we're gonna come back in just a minute to talk

(09:45):
about jamming, but first let's jam out to these messages
from our sponsors. Okay, we a quick down and dirty
overview of how radio works. But what if someone else
wanted to send a signal on the same frequency that

(10:07):
you were already using. And maybe you're using it to
just listen to music, maybe you're using it to communicate,
maybe you're using it as an infrastructure for wireless communication
between lots of different devices in your home. Well, if
someone wanted to use that same frequency band, that same channel,
if you will, and they happen to be really close
to you, that could be a problem. It'd kind of

(10:29):
be like putting a bunch of people who are all
picking up telephones on old landline systems and talking. Or
we go back to an analogy where you're trying to
hold a one on one conversation with somebody, but you
happen to be sitting at a table with six other
people and there's lots of cross talk going on. It
gets confusing. With radio. It could mean that whatever signal
is strongest wins. You might have been in this experience

(10:52):
where let's say you're on a road trip and you've
tuned to a radio station and you're starting to get
to that point where the radio station signal is weakening
and it's not as consistent or strong as it has
been and you're starting to lose it. Meanwhile, you might
be coming into the range of a competing radio signal,

(11:13):
and so for a while, your car radio sounds like
it's tuning to two different stations at the same time. Right,
you might hear little bits of one song versus chatter
on another station or whatever it may be, until eventually
it turns over to the other, the secondary radio station,
because that's the signal that is strongest and is speeding

(11:33):
through to your entertainment system. Well, if you're you know
that's unintentional. That's just two different radio stations that are
in the same broadcast range, that are on the same frequency.
But you could also do this on purpose, right, You
could blast out a radio signal, and you can use
one that is already in use for something else and
try to overwhelm it, and the devices in that area

(11:56):
that pick up radio are going to listen to whichever
signal is strongest. Countries around the world have over time
designated bands of frequencies in the radio spectrum for very
specific purposes, and you're not supposed to use them for
anything else. So this is intended to avoid interference as
well as clogging up the airwaves with competing signals. So,
for example, here in the United States, AM radio frequencies

(12:20):
amplitude modulated radio frequencies. They range from five hundred thirty
killer hurts, which is actually reserved for travelers information stations.
I don't think any AM radio stations are allowed to
broadcast at five thirty, but it goes up to seventeen
hundred killer hurts. So five thirty to seventeen hundred that's
the AM broadcast range. Each station has a bandwidth of

(12:42):
ten killer herts, so it's ten killer hurts wide, and
that goes five killer hurts above the signal and five
killer hurts below the signal. So technically you could say
five hundred and thirty that's really around five twenty five
killer hurts up to five thirty five killer hurts if
you were talking about you know the basic rules here. Meanwhile,
FM stations here in the United States range from eighty

(13:03):
eight point zero megahertz to one hundred and eight megahertz.
These channels have two hundred killohertz of bandwidth. Other nations
have slightly different parameters. You know, it's not universal. And
these radio signals are used for all sorts of things
besides just radio broadcasts. Right. Some are used for navigational purposes,
some are for mobile communications, some are for fixed communications,

(13:26):
some are for television broadcasts, some are for amateur radio,
et cetera. And it took a lot of time to
sort out which frequencies would be used for specific types
of communications and thus would be off limits to anything else.
And as I said, different countries have slightly different standards
for the sort of thing. But back to jamming. So,

(13:46):
during World War One, radio was still a very young
science and as such, while it served a purpose during
the war, it was limited as far as its utility
was concerned. Transmissions were typically very short range and nature,
and they could be affected by atmospheric conditions, like if
you had a storm or something that could really affect

(14:06):
whether or not you could pick anything up, Like just
the things like lightning would really mess up your radio communications.
According to the Digital Public Library of America, and aircraft
outfitted with a radio during World War One typically had
a maximum transmission range of two thousand yards, so that's
not much further than a single mile, and you can

(14:29):
imagine that in most wartime situations the radio would not
be instrumental to the success or failure of emission just
because of that limited transmission distance. Right, you wouldn't be
in contact with anyone for very long unless you were
just flying very tight circles in a very small region.
But by World War Two things had evolved considerably. Radio

(14:52):
technology was much more sophisticated than capable, and radio transmissions
would become integral to the war effort on both sides
of the conflict, and as such, interfering with radio transmissions
would become part of warfare. Interrupting enemy communication channels obviously
a high priority whenever you're talking about wartime conflicts. On

(15:16):
the ally side, there were outfits like the thirty sixth
Bombardment Squadron the thirty six BS. It was part of
the Mighty eighth Air Force, and the thirty six BS
would fly missions over enemy territory and attempt to jam
or spoof radio axis communications, and sometimes that also meant
jamming radar stations, just as our little silly example at

(15:39):
the top of this episode was. Now in this case
it didn't involve dropping raspberry jam on anybody. They would
release what was called well, they were called windows, but
you might know it better as chaff. These are thin
strips of metal, and it's a way to fool radar
stations that are on the ground that there are enemy
fighters overhead, right, because the strips of metal will actually

(16:02):
interact with the radio waves the radar is sending out,
and the radar will mistakenly believe that there are enemy
fighters overhead, when in fact it's just this chaff that's
falling from bombers that are dropping it. And this becomes
a distraction for radar stations. And if you're doing this
as part of an effort of an actual attack, it

(16:24):
can mean that eyes are on the wrong part of
the sky, or that anti aircraft weaponry are trained on
the wrong part of the sky, which is the most
important bit right, and then you can carry out your
attack with less resistance from the enemy. But with radio
often the strategy was to use powerful transmitters to commandeer
enemy communications and send incorrect information. So this was a

(16:48):
spoofing attack. You may be familiar with that term spoofing.
It means that the attacker is pretending to be someone
or something else and is trying to trick you into
thinking that a communication is from this particular source, but
in fact it's a hacker or attacker posing as that source.

(17:08):
So in this case, the attackers would pose as the
enemy and would give bad intel or false orders in
an effort to gain an advantage. So the Royal Air
Force of the UK had a project called Operation Corona
that was dedicated to this effort. The RAF found native
German speakers to pose as flight controllers to confound German pilots. Eventually,

(17:34):
the German Luftwaffe caught onto this and their response was
to replace all their flight controllers with women, so that
if a pilot heard a male voice speaking in German
giving them new orders, they would know, oh, that's one
of the allies posing as a flight controller. Disregard those orders.

(17:55):
Of course, the UK they figured this out too, and
they began to employ women to serve as these spoofed
German flight controllers. So it went back and forth in
an old seesaw. Now, obviously, signal jamming in warfare has
continued since World War Two. Russia has been doing it
like crazy to Ukraine, for example. Some methods allow the

(18:20):
one attacker to suppress radio communications by effectively broadcasting silence.
You know, in the old days, it was that you
were using it to intrude upon their signal and send
something else. Now you can actually just suppress the communications entirely,
not just you know, intruding on the signal. If your

(18:41):
targets are unaware that they're being jammed, they might not
even realize for a bit that no communications are going
through like other people might be desperately trying to get
in touch with them, but none of the signals reached
their destination. And that could be really handy if you
know you are an enemy of this target and your
plan an assault of some sort. But outside of warfare,

(19:03):
there are other uses for signal jamming and signal intrusion,
though we are largely talking about the murky world of
illegal activity. In most cases. Keep in mind, the use
of specific frequencies is a highly regulated affair in most countries,
and folks founded to have intruded upon those uses typically

(19:26):
face some stiff penalties when they're caught. We'll talk more
about these nefarious uses of signal jamming and some famous
examples after we take this quick break to thank our sponsors.

(19:48):
We're back, all right. Let's say that you are an
enterprising young person, maybe Christian Slater, and you want to
build your own pirate race station so that you can
broadcast without first securing a broadcast license. So you could
get in real hot water because you don't actually have

(20:09):
permission to use the radio frequencies, even if the frequency
is unused in your area, right like, no one is
broadcasting on this particular frequency. If you don't have a
license to broadcast in that range, assuming you're not like
just broadcasting across amateur radio, well you're going to get
some trouble. Although a lot of people have gone ahead

(20:31):
and done it anyway, because I mean tracking down who's
doing it, that's a different matter. It actually is pretty
tricky to zone in on the specific location of where
someone is doing this. If you're transmitting over a really
large area, it narrows things down because you do have
to have an antenna to push a transmission out. So
if you're doing so with a high power transmitter, chances

(20:54):
are people by'd say, oh, maybe it's the house that
has the fifty foot broadcast tower behind it. But assuming
you're not doing a massive area, it could be a
lot trickier to track the location down. Now a lot
of this ends up being kind of moot anyway, because
the Internet and streaming platforms have really made pirate radio

(21:15):
kind of a quaint and arguably obsolete form of punkish disobedience.
You still might have to deal with consequences if you're
choosing to stream and you're including a lot of licensed
material that you don't you know, actually license, But that's different, right,
you might get banned from the streaming platform because you

(21:35):
know you're violating policies by playing ip covered music without
actually having the license to do so. So I guess
I'll have to wait on launching my internet radio station
dedicated to glam punk and new wave hits. But you
know my time will come now. Some folks have used
transmitters to overwhelm the airwaves and transmit absolute nonsense and mischief.

(21:58):
Sometimes they actually do so in an effort to push
out a public message that in itself isn't necessarily nonsense,
but the framing of it tends to be a little weird. So,
for example, in nineteen fifty nine, on April first, one
or more jokesters used broadcast intrusion. They overpowered the audio

(22:19):
part of a television signal that was coming from the
TV station KATV in Arkansas, and if you were tuned
in to watch the news on KATV on this day,
April first, nineteen fifty nine, audio would suddenly drop out
and then you would hear a voice claiming to belong
to Powell Clayton. Powell Clayton was a general for the

(22:41):
Union during the US Civil War. He was very much
dead by nineteen fifty nine. He had also served as
the governor of Arkansas at one point, and this voice
was telling KATV viewers that they needed to quote share
in the Great Awakening end quote. So by that, presumably
the late general meant that Arkansas citizens were to embrace

(23:02):
racial integration in the state, which is a serious and
applaudable message, right integration, Great, that's a great message. It is. However,
a questionable means of delivering that message. So an investigation followed.
But while the assumption was whomever pulled off the stunt
had a good working knowledge of radio, no one was
actually identified like it was assumed, Okay, this person knows

(23:25):
their way around radio transmissions or else they wouldn't have
been able to pull this off. So that eliminates a
huge number of the folks in the region, right, it's
just the people who know radio. But it's entirely possible
it was like a college student who maybe had some
experience working at the college radio station. There were plenty
of those in Arkansas in nineteen fifty nine. So while

(23:47):
it narrowed it down, it didn't eliminate like nearly all
the suspects. There's still plenty of people it could have been.
And maybe it wasn't a college student at all, or
maybe it was someone who had learned in college but
had long since grad We'll likely never know. But that
didn't stop some people from proposing outlandish theories about who
was behind this, and they ranged from everything from a

(24:09):
communist takeover, because keep in mind, nineteen fifty nine, that's
like height of the Cold War. To quote an inevitable
Yankee reinvasion of America. End quote. Now this was a
quote from a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans,
so you can imagine this person had a particular point
of view. But I'm not sure if anyone ever told

(24:32):
this person that the Union won the Civil War, so
there was no need for Yankees to reinvade anything, because
it's not an invasion. The Arkansas was part of the
Union and remained part of the Union. So yeah, it
was a pretty ludicrous act to send a message in

(24:53):
this way, but it really just revealed more lunacy in
the state of Arkansas. In nineteen seventy seven, on November
twenty six, someone in the UK was able to take
over a broadcast signal from Southern Television. They did so
in order to send an audio only message. So again,
the audio of the television broadcast drops out and this

(25:16):
audio goes in its place, and the audio was a
person who claimed to be an alien named vrillin Vlo
n I am told and that this alien wished to
warn earthlings that they really needed to shape up or
get the heck out of Dodge. And in this case,
by Dodge, I mean the galaxy. I am sad to
report that, despite it being nearly fifty years later, we

(25:40):
humans still don't have our act together. So I expect
Villain will be back any day now to chide us
for falling short. Or you know, it was just some
random person having a laugh by hijacking a TV signal
by pushing out a competing broadcast signal of greater strength. Now,
perhaps the most famous broadcast intrusion event, at least here

(26:01):
in the United States, happened on November twenty second, nineteen
eighty seven. That was the infamous Max Headroom incident, in
which a person wearing a Max Headroom mask interrupted television
broadcasts on two separate TV stations in Chicago, Illinois. So,
for those of y'all who don't have any idea who
Max Headroom is, he's a fictional character. He was originally

(26:24):
created to serve as a television host for a program
that would show music videos on British TV, and he
was presented as being a computer generated AI character like
he was supposed to be like a computer animated figure
and AI controlled. Now, in fact, an actual human being
was portraying Max Headroom. That human being being Matt Frewer,

(26:45):
who did a great job. By the way, I love
old Max Headroom videos. They are weird, like really strange.
I would like to think that Space Ghost Coast to
Coast copied a lot from the Max Headroom days. Anyway,
Max Headroom would go on to become an advertising spokesman,
a talk show host, and a TV show character like

(27:07):
in his own sci fi television series. A very unlikely
thing to have happened, but it did happen. So this
signal hijacker was wearing a Max Headroom mask and the
first thing that he did was he interrupted Chicago's WGN
TV signal. This was like at nine o'clock or so,

(27:29):
and this incident lasted less than half a minute, so
not long enough for things to really get crazy, but
it was very odd and I'm sure unsettling for people
who are watching television at nine o'clock. And a couple
of hours later that night, the same person interrupted a
signal from WTTW, which is a PBS affiliate station in

(27:51):
the Chicago area, or at least was at the time,
and this interruption included the man in the Max Headroom
mask speaking the so it's was very hard to make
out what he was actually saying. There was a lot
of distortion in the audio, and plus the mask made
it difficult to hear. But there was also a second person,
a female presenting person dressed in a French made outfit,

(28:12):
who was spanking the Max Hedgerroom masked dude with a
fly swatter to really really high brow stuff. The weird
signal intrusion which lasted, you know, just just a relatively
short amount of time. It made national headlines. It was
got a lot of media coverage because it was such
a weird thing to have happened. But to this day

(28:33):
it's unknown who actually pulled it off. Well unknown to
most of us, anyway. Some folks surely know about it
because they did it. But once upon a time, Chuck
Bryant of stuff you should know, joined to be on
tech Stuff to talk about this specific incident. You can
actually find that episode in the tech Stuff archives. It
originally published on November third, twenty fourteen, ten years ago.

(28:58):
Holy cow, I've been doing this a long time now.
Those are not the only incidents of signal intrusion, of course.
There are others, including cases in which the identity of
the person responsible is ultimately discovered and that person was
later punished. But apart from mischief, there are other reasons
why some folks are interested in signal jamming, like using

(29:19):
signal jamming as part of an effort to rob someone blind.
So obviously a lot of homes these days are protected
by systems that rely on local network connections, often wireless connections.
So let's say that you're a burglar. You a dirty, dirty,
dirty person. So you're casing a joint and you notice

(29:40):
that this particular target has security cameras, and obviously you
don't want your mug showing up on the five o'clock news,
not when you got I don't know, see TV and
maybe some funko pops to sell. I might just be
looking around the stuff that I have in my house.
I do not own expensive stuff. I just want that
to get out there to any potential thieves. The stuff

(30:01):
I own is largely junk and only has sentimental value. Anyway,
this is not just a hypothetical problem of thieves using
signal jammers in order to rob a house and to
dismantle the security systems, or at least to temporarily block them.
On July twentieth, twenty twenty four, Mark Tyson of Tom's

(30:23):
Hardware published an article titled lapd Warren's Residents after spike
and burglaries using Wi Fi jammers that disable security cameras,
smart door bells. So Wi Fi of course works over
radio waves, right like Wi Fi is just a different
brand of radio. It's a different set of frequencies at
two point four gigaherts and five point zero gigaherts. Like

(30:46):
other radio signals, Wi Fi can also be overwhelmed. So
Wi Fi jammers are a thing now. They are not
legal in the United States, at least they're not legal
to use here in the US, but they're there's still
something that you can find online, Like you can buy
these things online. They're not even particularly that expensive. They're
typically less than one hundred dollars or even less than

(31:08):
fifty dollars. So if you had one of these things,
you could turn it on and use it to disable
Wi Fi in an area, and in the process you
could knock out cameras that are Wi Fi connected and
they wouldn't be able to transmit or record you sneaking
up because that connection gets jammed. Same thing with alarm

(31:30):
systems right that are Wi Fi enabled, And that's important
to note it is Wi Fi enabled once. If you
have things that are hardwired, that's different. Right, They're not
relying on radio signals for their operation. They're transmitting over
wired connections, so those are not going to be affected
by these Wi Fi jammers. I mean, you could get

(31:51):
to a point where you have actual interference through the cables,
but typically cables are shielded well enough so that such
interference doesn't actually affect them. They have to be because
you don't know what kind of environment these systems are
going to be, and presumably it's going to be in
one that does have exposure to other radio waves, so
you have to shield the cables or else, you know,

(32:13):
you would just get interference from everything. So wired systems
not as effected. But if it's a Wi Fi based system, yeah,
that's going to be an issue. And obviously a Wi
Fi jammer is not just going to knock out the
security system, it's going to knock out your connection to
the Internet. Potentially, it could mean that you don't have
any connectivity to emergency services, so it could be a

(32:34):
real dangerous situation. So that's the reason why they're illegal
here in the United States. They're also illegal in several
other countries. The US is not alone in this. Some governments,
typically those on the more authoritarian side of the political landscape,
have been known to employ signal jammers to silence those
who would question the government. So the Chinese government, for example,

(32:55):
has a history of jamming incoming signals from Radio Free
Asia and at times other stations like BBC World Service
among others. So jamming is often used in conjunction with
other methods in order to impose censorship on citizens. So
that's kind of the overview of jamming. The question is
what can you do about it? Like, what if you

(33:17):
are the subject of signal jamming, either you're targeted in
particular or you're affected in a region that is being
hit by some form of signal jamming, Well, you can't
do much about it other than move out of the
range and perhaps get you know, signal again by leaving
the area that's affected. You could shut down the device

(33:42):
that's jamming the signal if you can find it, but
you know, discovering the actual location of a signal jammer
isn't easy these devices, particularly for the stuff that doesn't
affect huge ranges, things that are for the more immediate
area they don't have to be very large, so they
could easily be hidden somewhere and you'd have to be
searching around everything in order to find them. Or they

(34:03):
might even just be like in someone's backpack or something
as they're walking by. That would be very difficult for
you to track down. And you wouldn't be able to
just walk up to some random person and say, hey,
let me see what's in your backpack. That's it's not
how that works. So you know, if you're talking about
these small devices, if you've got signal interference as a

(34:23):
result of jamming, the culprit is likely nearby, like within
fifteen meters of your location, because these things don't have
a very long transmission range. Finding the device and turning
it off is all that you need to do to
restore service. But you know that is tricky if someone's
high to get effectively wired communications, obviously, that's a big difference.
Right if you're using hardwired connections with most of your stuff,

(34:46):
jammers are not likely to have much of an effect
on you. Like if you have a router and everything
you've got is connected by Ethernet cable and that's it.
You don't have wireless connectivity, then you don't I need
to worry so much. But I don't know anyone who
is just strictly hardwired. I mean pretty much everyone I
know who uses Internet connected devices is relying at least

(35:08):
in part on wireless ones, so those would obviously be
impacted by a Wi Fi signal jammer. And again, unless
you're able to find the source of the jam, it
kind of stuck until that person or thing has moved on.
So yeah, that's the bad news. The good news is
I don't think it's that revalent. Apparently it's prevalent enough

(35:29):
in certain areas of Los Angeles for it to become newsworthy,
So that is an issue if you live in an
area like that. Being aware of it is very important
because you might recognize certain signals to use a pun
that you're being jammed, and being aware of that is

(35:50):
very important. Being on the lookout for suspicious activity is
really important. But apart from that, you're not likely to
encounter it. There might be occasional case is where someone
is being disruptive on purpose, Like I could easily imagine
someone sneaking a signal jammer into say a tech conference,
in order to wreak havoc as part of a haha,

(36:14):
I prank to you kind of thing. We saw something
similar with that a few years ago, several years ago
now at ces when someone was essentially using the equivalent
of a universal remote to shut down televisions that were
on display during a tech presentation, a pr presentation at CEES,
which was a low class, dirty down thing to do.

(36:37):
But yeah, I could see someone trying to do something
like that just to cause disruption. But apart from that,
I don't know that you're ever going to encounter it, unless, again,
you happen to live in a place where robberies are
starting to make use of these technologies in an effort
to cover up people's identities. Well they target a house.

(36:58):
That's a serious issue. Anyway. Hey, that is our episode
on Signal Jamming. I hope you are all well and
I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit

(37:19):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.