Comments on: AQ EW?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 10:55:13 +0000

I’m not even going to start on what’s wrong with this article. As soon as it mentions AQ and Iran as partners I began to laugh. This author doesn

By: TrustButVerify

TrustButVerify — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:14:25 +0000

The story as linked smells of propganda. In simplest terms, it doesn’t make technical sense; it’s either balderdash or using the wrong terms to describe what they’re talking about.

By: pedestrian

pedestrian — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:00:13 +0000

>With passive radio direction finding equipment
You could also have that mounted on the vehicle and detect where RF signals came from to detonate RF triggered IEDs. The next second the IED is triggered, you get to know where the IED team is and they are dead. By the way, do you think the IED teams will be able to have access to those equipment for sure? They don’t need that in the first place. They’ve got scouts to spot the vehicles. They even used kites to alert vehicles nearby.

By: Grandjester

Grandjester — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:11:09 +0000

Again, the units on the hummers must be fairly low power (a 120 watt amplifier would use about 4 amps) due to power limits, plus not interfereing with their own comm gear. I don’t think it would be efficient for us or them to network the proper triangulation, especially in an urban environment, but it may come to that.

By: Watching Them, Watching Us

Watching Them, Watching Us — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:28:53 +0000

Surely any active radio jammers fitted to vehicles simply give the enemy plenty of warning to prepare an ambush with a command line detonated bomb ?
With passive radio direction finding equipment, such vehicle mounted jammers could also betray the movement patterns of patrol or convoy vehicles, over a large distance, given the easy availability of portable computers and software capable of plotting such signals rapidly and automatically onto a map.

By: US Marine

US Marine — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:52:48 +0000

How are you going to jam a jammer? I’ve worked with all those devices over there as an infantryman, I’m not going to go into detail — but from what I’m reading here such a device would not work against what we use there. I hope they are trying such a thing though, because we could easily triangulate the source of any jamming attempt and eliminate it. There are easier ways to defeat the jammers we use, broadcasting your location to every antenna farm in Iraq is not a good way to go about it.

By: Grandjester

Grandjester — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:28:33 +0000

Yeah, I smell bullshit. There are any number of RF devices that can be used for a trigger across a pretty wide spectrum of just the commercial/civilian frequencies. Cell & Cordless phones, garage door openers, UHF, VHF, and so on. A cheap wireless microphone might have hundreds of potential freqs. Transmitter power on the Hummer would be limited by both the potential of interference and the power available from the hummer, which we all know is already taxed. Any IED transmitter would only have to generate a stronger signal to be effective. IF door chimes or line of sight devices would create additional problems for our attempts to defeat. We would literally have to bombard the entire RF range with white noise at very high power (tens of thousands of watts) and the IR spectrum with “light” to defeat all possible scenarios. Very difficult when the device needs less than an tenth of a second to receive that signal. This is all strictly Radio Shack stuff too, you don’t need a multi-million $$$ ECM budget (or the Iranians for that matter) to pull it off. Finally, any sort of hard wire defeats all these countermeasures.

By: Nicholas Weaver

Nicholas Weaver — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:27:08 +0000

Firstly, calling the insurgency “Al Quaeda” is definatly a tipoff to be suspicious. Likewise Iran cooperates strongly with Shiites, but would be quite happy to see the Sunnis burn in hell, while Al Quaeda is a Sunni group. Thus any site which would conflate the two must be viewed with suspicion.
Second, it is a cat and mouse game which there are well known countermeasures to electronic jamming: IR triggers (both “pass a point” triggers and line of site command detonation. Think remote control), physical triggers, wires, timers, etc.
Third, the US EM jamming can’t be absolute, as the US radios still have to work. Expect radio-detonated bombs to converge into that part of the frequency space.