The Russian military is buying up jamming devices which it plans to mount on cell phone towers. The idea behind it is simple — the Kremlin could switch on the jammers, known as Pole-21 to confuse American GPS guidance.
Russia has about 250,000 cellular base stations.
Russia is betting on disrupting a missile’s receiver just enough to stop a direct hit. “The transmission of an elementary signal from a satellite lies at the foundation of all satellite navigation systems,” Russian military analyst Anton Lavrov told Izvestiya. “Therefore, the slightest deviation from the designated frequency even for milliseconds will result in a loss of accuracy.”
O.E. Watch, a monthly newsletter published by the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, noted that the devices appear to be part of a larger push by Russia to prepare itself for the possibility of major conflict.
“These initiatives coincide with other efforts to prepare Russia for large-scale conventional warfare, such as massive ‘snap’ exercises, reformation of the reserve system, exercising wartime command and control relationships, and testing the nationalization of the industrial base in the event of a transition to a wartime footing,” O.E. Watch stated.
Russian Defense Ministry has adopted a system of jamming "Pole-21" protecting Russian strategic facilities from enemy cruise missiles, guided bombs and drones are used for navigation and targeting GPS satellite system, Glonass, Galileo and Beidou. Latest jammers developed by JSC "Scientific and Technical Center of electronic warfare" (STC EW) - is mounted on the cell tower and integrated with the transmit antennas station RFI P-340RP, combined into a single network, covering impervious to signal satellite navigation dome entire neighborhoods
All four satellite navigation systems, the signals of which the Pole-21 must combat, use closely spaced frequencies, which end up in the interval from 1176.45 to 1575.42 MHz. The fact that even a transmitter with an output of a total of 20 watts in order to jam the radio signals in this range in a radius of 80 kilometers attests to the latest Russian system’s capabilities to create an impenetrable jamming dome….
…At the same time, the system has one shortcoming. As is indicated in its description, “The fact that this complex creates jamming both for the enemy, who is using the GPS radio navigation system, and also for domestic consumers of this GPS radio navigation system and also for its
Russian GLONASS equivalent”…
Russia is also looking at leveraging existing GSM cellular towers as a detection system for unmanned aerial vehicles, cruise missiles and light aircraft.
