Speaker 1: A common trope in science fiction is the strategic move
Speaker 1: of signal jamming, interfering with your enemy's ability to communicate.
Speaker 1: My personal favorite example of this is not from Star
Speaker 1: Wars or from Star Trek, but Space Balls. When their
Speaker 1: communications fail, they realize they've been jammed because literal raspberry
Speaker 1: jam drips across the screen. But is that really how
Speaker 1: jamming technology works or is it more like noise canceling
Speaker 1: headphones or something else. Today we'll dig into the physics
Speaker 1: of signal jamming, including the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Kelly Winer Smith. I study parasites and space.
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm a
Speaker 1: big fan of jam.
Speaker 2: Oh, but not the kind that we're talking about today.
Speaker 2: Were you in a band or anything in high school?
Speaker 1: Oh? I played the clarinet in a marching band and
Speaker 1: you could totally not hear anything. And I played the
Speaker 1: saxophone in a jazz band, so not a very cool
Speaker 1: kind of band. But yeah, I've been in bands. How
Speaker 1: about you? You were goth as a teenager, so you're
Speaker 1: either listening to or performing music. Yeah, I'm guessing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I played the electric guitar in some grundrock bands. Pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: And you were recently invited by a listener to be
Speaker 1: on their hip hop track.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll see where that goes. They said I needed
Speaker 2: singing experience, so I'm guessing that's going to disqualify because
Speaker 2: singing in the car probably doesn't count.
Speaker 1: I don't know that's experienced showers and cars.
Speaker 2: I guess we'll see, all right. So my question for
Speaker 2: you today is we're talking about like, you know, equipment
Speaker 2: and when it doesn't work, whether it's you know, because
Speaker 2: someone's being malicious or not, that's really frustrating. So what
Speaker 2: piece of equipment in your life has been the most
Speaker 2: frustrating to you? Oh?
Speaker 1: Wow? I think the thing I'm most often frustrated by
Speaker 1: are the things I use most to, like a phone
Speaker 1: or a computer. But in reality, these things are amazing.
Speaker 1: Like I use my computer for hours every single day.
Speaker 1: It's always there, it's almost always works exactly as I
Speaker 1: expect it to, so my frustration there is really unfair.
Speaker 1: I think the frustration that's most fairly targeted is to
Speaker 1: the dishwasher, because like it's got a simple job. It
Speaker 1: does one thing and it just doesn't work a lot
Speaker 1: of the times. You know, like, why can't we just
Speaker 1: invent the dishwasher where you put the dishes in and
Speaker 1: they get washed.
Speaker 2: It does a lot of things though, it like it
Speaker 2: senses how dirty the dishes are, it washes them. It
Speaker 2: dries them also, that's another thing it does. It does
Speaker 2: at least two things.
Speaker 1: Wow, look at you standing up for dishwashers.
Speaker 2: I mean, they are kind of incredible. They save you
Speaker 2: a lot of time.
Speaker 1: When they become AI empowered and take over the world,
Speaker 1: they're going to listen to this podcast and they're going
Speaker 1: to know you're one of them.
Speaker 2: I'm hedge in my bets man.
Speaker 1: Well as a person who's done a lot of home
Speaker 1: improvement projects. Kelly, which piece of equipment in your life
Speaker 1: have you been most frustrated by?
Speaker 2: Oh, you know, I think I love all of my
Speaker 2: power tools equally. I think I think the thing. So
Speaker 2: I had a piece of equipment I worked with that
Speaker 2: gave me really big highs and really big lows. And
Speaker 2: that was the electro fishing boat that I used in
Speaker 2: grad school. So I was doing a largemouth bass survey
Speaker 2: in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta and we were trying
Speaker 2: to catch largemouth bass. And I loved driving this boat.
Speaker 2: It was so much fun. I loved operating the boat.
Speaker 2: And when nobody was around at like four am, when
Speaker 2: we were putting the boat, you know, like down the
Speaker 2: ramp and into the delta, that was amazing. But at
Speaker 2: busy times of day, when I had to like use
Speaker 2: our giant truck and back the boat down the ramp,
Speaker 2: that was the most frustrating because inevitably, some incredibly well
Speaker 2: meaning guy would see, oh, a woman is trying to
Speaker 2: back the boat down the ramp. And they never were
Speaker 2: helping the guys. It was only when I was trying.
Speaker 2: And again they were trying to be very nice, right,
Speaker 2: and I appreciated their help, but it wasn't really helping
Speaker 2: because I did a great job on my own. But
Speaker 2: when they were trying to tell me, I would get
Speaker 2: really flustered because you know, you turn the you know,
Speaker 2: the wheel in one direction, the bocos in the opposite direction,
Speaker 2: and when somebody is trying to tell you, like go
Speaker 2: that way, it gets more confusing. I was doing flying
Speaker 2: on my own, but whenever somebody would try to help me.
Speaker 2: That's when I would mess it up. I just wanted
Speaker 2: to like leave my window rolled up and be like, no,
Speaker 2: I'm not listening to you, but then that would have
Speaker 2: been rude. And so anyway, that was my most frustrating
Speaker 2: equipment experience was trying to get the boat down the
Speaker 2: ramp when people were around. And again I wasn't mad
Speaker 2: at them. They were trying to help. That was nice.
Speaker 1: And you're not even mad at the equipment, right.
Speaker 2: No, I'm not even mad at the equipment. It was
Speaker 2: just like, it's just a very frustrating experience. Every time
Speaker 2: I'd pull up to the boat ramp, I'd get like
Speaker 2: anxious if there was anybody else there. But that's why
Speaker 2: I really liked being on the crew that would start
Speaker 2: at like four am, because usually there was no one
Speaker 2: else there and I could just whoop in one like
Speaker 2: fell swoop, get it down and then we'd be in
Speaker 2: the water and we'd go out when collect our fish.
Speaker 1: Well, we aren't all out on the water at four
Speaker 1: am to collect fish. But almost everybody lives a life
Speaker 1: that's dominated by machines electronic devices that enable your life
Speaker 1: and make it easier or more complicated or just more fun.
Speaker 1: And sometimes they don't work just because they're busted or
Speaker 1: it's user error, but sometimes it's malicious. That's right, somebody
Speaker 1: out there is interfering with your use of your devices.
Speaker 1: And today we're going to talk about one of those
Speaker 1: modes of interference, signal jamming, which appears all over the
Speaker 1: place in popular media and science fiction. And a bunch
Speaker 1: of people wrote in and said, hey, can you explain
Speaker 1: what is signal jamming?
Speaker 2: And I'm glad that they did because I love hearing
Speaker 2: stuff like this explo by Daniel. You'll get the clearest
Speaker 2: explanation when Daniel's the one explaining it. But let's go
Speaker 2: ahead and ask our extraordinaries, you know, the ones who
Speaker 2: didn't write in to ask for a better explanation. How
Speaker 2: does a signal jammer work? And here's what they had
Speaker 2: to say.
Speaker 1: You have a wave that's getting canceled out by another wave.
Speaker 2: They probably emit electromagnetic waves. It's just the right frequency
Speaker 2: to be perfectly deconstructive to other waves.
Speaker 3: By inserting destructive interference essentially the inverse waves of any
Speaker 3: intended communication, thus making it be unintelligible. Kind of how
Speaker 3: noise canceling headphones insert anti noise to negate out any
Speaker 3: undesirable outside noise. I have no idea how signal jamma works.
Speaker 2: My best guess would be that it uses photons in some.
Speaker 3: Way scrambling the radio waves. I don't know, some sort
Speaker 3: of powder way disrupting the others, but it needs to
Speaker 3: be a superior powderway. Can you hit a particle way
Speaker 3: with another particle.
Speaker 2: Way by sending a bunch of random data of the
Speaker 2: same signal type that screws up the receiver so it
Speaker 2: doesn't know what data is real and what's stake.
Speaker 1: All right. I love the idea of superior particles that
Speaker 1: you can like zap one kind of particle another kind
Speaker 1: of particle and it'll be dominated nice.
Speaker 2: Yes, that is pretty epic.
Speaker 1: The way you say nice reminds me that this weekend
Speaker 1: I was hanging out with a two year old and
Speaker 1: she's in this phase of just like picking up words,
Speaker 1: and something happened she like dropped a marble right under
Speaker 1: her mom's eye, and I said nice. And then every
Speaker 1: time she did something mischievous the whole evening, she went nice,
Speaker 1: and I laughed my head off. Anyway, these are very
Speaker 1: nice responses and the theme that emerges for me is
Speaker 1: that a lot of people think it's destructive interference. They
Speaker 1: think it's this fancy wave canceling stuff, like the thing
Speaker 1: happening with your noise cancelation headphones. So I think it's
Speaker 1: great that we're going to dig into the actual mechanics
Speaker 1: of how signal jamming works, because hint, hint, it's not
Speaker 1: destructive interference.
Speaker 2: What all right, So how our message is actually sent?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So to understand how signals are jammed, we have
Speaker 1: to understand the physics of signals. And for this conversation,
Speaker 1: we're going to ignore quantum mechanics because you mostly can.
Speaker 1: And as a reminder, you know, anytime we do physics,
Speaker 1: we're always using a simplified description of the universe. We
Speaker 1: can't bring all of our knowledge to bear all at
Speaker 1: once because tomorrow and we don't need to and number
Speaker 1: two then we'd get nothing done ever, because we'd be
Speaker 1: solving Einstein's equations in impossible ways. So we're always just
Speaker 1: like choosing what aspects of physics to use and neglecting
Speaker 1: some little bits. And for this conversation, we can treat
Speaker 1: this like classical and electromagnetism. So we have electric fields
Speaker 1: and magnetic fields and oscillations within them, and we can
Speaker 1: ignore like quantum pulses and fussiness and all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, well, you know, and we only have an hour.
Speaker 2: And when we talk about messages, are we talking about
Speaker 2: like radio messages cell phone messages or are those all
Speaker 2: kind of the same thing.
Speaker 1: Those are all kind of the same thing. Everything here
Speaker 1: is a signal that's transmitted wirelessly, which means it's a
Speaker 1: pulse in the electromagnetic field, right, And so we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about messages encoded as pulses in the electromagnetic field,
Speaker 1: which basically means you're sending light invisible light or visible
Speaker 1: light of various frequencies. Right. And so when you listen
Speaker 1: to your radio, for example, you're getting radio waves. Radio
Speaker 1: waves are oscillations in the electromagnetic field that are picked
Speaker 1: up by your radio. When you listen to your cell phone,
Speaker 1: you're getting cellular information that's oscillations of the electromagnetic field,
Speaker 1: just at a different frequency. When you used to watch
Speaker 1: TV with antennas, you are picking up signals over the air,
Speaker 1: which are just oscillations in the electromagnetic field. When you
Speaker 1: tap your credit card on something to pay for it.
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of electromagnetic information being passed back
Speaker 1: and forth. So all of these things are electromagnetic, right,
Speaker 1: So all these messages are electromagnetic. They're just oscillations in
Speaker 1: the electromagnetic field, okay, And the way that you send
Speaker 1: them is an antenna. Right, So let's think about what
Speaker 1: is the physics of an antenna. It's like a long
Speaker 1: cylinder of metal. It's got a bunch of electrons in there, right,
Speaker 1: and you apply some current the electrons to move one
Speaker 1: way and the electrons to move the other way. Now,
Speaker 1: electrons have an electric charge, right, and so they make
Speaker 1: an electric field. So if an antenna is just sitting there,
Speaker 1: it has an electric field. And if you pull on
Speaker 1: the electrons to move them, the electric field changes because
Speaker 1: you're moving the electrons. The electric field moves with the electrons. Right.
Speaker 1: That makes sense. So if you have one electron, for example,
Speaker 1: and you wiggle it, what happens, Well, instead of having
Speaker 1: the same electric field through time, Now that electric field
Speaker 1: is changing. I move the electron, electric field moves with it. Right.
Speaker 1: All cool? But if I move my electron here in California,
Speaker 1: can Kelly tell immediately that I've moved my electron. No,
Speaker 1: she can only tell when the new electric field gets
Speaker 1: to her, so there's a time delay. If I wiggle
Speaker 1: my electron up and down, then I create a wiggling
Speaker 1: electric field through time that eventually gets to Kelly and
Speaker 1: she can pick it up with her electric field measuring device.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense?
Speaker 2: That does? Okay, It's kind of amazing that wiggling electric
Speaker 2: fields can give you like music and complicated.
Speaker 1: I know, crazy, yeah, And so all of this information
Speaker 1: is just encoded in wiggling electric fields, which create magnetic fields.
Speaker 1: And that's what light is, right. Light is a coupled
Speaker 1: oscillation between electric fields and magnetic fields. They're very tightly linked,
Speaker 1: and changing electric fields make magnetic fields, changing magnetic fields
Speaker 1: make electric fields. So it's this incredible physical phenomena that
Speaker 1: you can send information through the universe if they're in
Speaker 1: these fields. And as you say, it's really cool that
Speaker 1: you can use those wiggles to represent almost any kind
Speaker 1: of information. Right. You can like encode my voice, you
Speaker 1: can send data. You know, you can send anything essentially
Speaker 1: if you just come up with some way to encode it.
Speaker 1: You say, this kind of wiggle means that this other
Speaker 1: kind of wiggle means something else, and then you can
Speaker 1: use that to transmit information. And so the basic physical
Speaker 1: setup is you have an antenna where you are controlling
Speaker 1: the electrons, which means you control the wiggles and somebody
Speaker 1: else the receiver. Kelly has an antenna, and when the
Speaker 1: electric field arrives at Kelly, how does she know that
Speaker 1: it's changed. Well, her antenna's electrons get wiggled by the
Speaker 1: electric field for the same reason that wiggling my electrons
Speaker 1: makes a wiggling electric field. That wiggling electric field when
Speaker 1: it arrives at Kelly's antenna, it wiggles her electrons. Then
Speaker 1: she has electronics to pick up those wiggles as current
Speaker 1: and that's her signal. So effectively, I send a signal
Speaker 1: in my electronics to a signal in Kelly's electronics. That's
Speaker 1: how message transmission works.
Speaker 2: Okay, And this works because like so, these messages need
Speaker 2: to pass through like buildings and forests and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: And does some of it get lost as it passes
Speaker 2: through that? Or no, because electrons and their fields just
Speaker 2: go through stuff.
Speaker 1: Or do yeah, yeah, great question. The answer is yes
Speaker 1: and no. It depends on the frequency So for example,
Speaker 1: if you're doing radio, then your frequencies are like kill
Speaker 1: a hertz or megahertz. Right, when you're listening to like
Speaker 1: rock one o seven point nine, one oh seven point
Speaker 1: nine means one hundred and seven point nine megaherts is
Speaker 1: the frequency of that signal. When you're using Wi Fi,
Speaker 1: then it's like two point four or five gigahertz, right,
Speaker 1: those are hurts. Those are frequencies. It tells you how
Speaker 1: many times the signal oscillates per second. Five gigaherts is
Speaker 1: five billion oscillations per second.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Cell phones use like six hundred megaherts to like fifty gigaherts.
Speaker 1: So each one has a different frequency range and different
Speaker 1: frequencies behave differently just the same with it, like different
Speaker 1: frequencies of light are either visible or invisible, and different
Speaker 1: stuff is transparent or opaque. Like X rays pass right
Speaker 1: through your soft muscle tissue, but they don't pass through
Speaker 1: bone and light visible light doesn't pass through soft muscle tissue, right,
Speaker 1: So different things are transparent to different frequencies. In general,
Speaker 1: shorter frequency stuff like cell phones and Wi Fi has
Speaker 1: shorter ranges than longer frequency stuff like radio. There's less
Speaker 1: atmospheric absorption. Like the atmosphere is more transparent to radio
Speaker 1: than it is to Wi Fi and cell towers, so
Speaker 1: it doesn't fizzle out as much, and radio is less
Speaker 1: sensitive to like small obstacles. Radio can also bounce off
Speaker 1: the atmosphere sometimes depending on the frequency, and so it's
Speaker 1: easier to pick up radio for miles and miles away
Speaker 1: or you know, like ham radio operators can talk to
Speaker 1: people from around the world using those frequencies, whereas you
Speaker 1: can never do that with like cell phone towers. But
Speaker 1: cell phone towers are designed to only cover like the
Speaker 1: region that you're in. You don't want to hear from
Speaker 1: other cell phone towers.
Speaker 2: Okay, I feel like I remember when we had a
Speaker 2: conversation about space based solar we were talking about frequencies,
Speaker 2: like what frequency would you pick so that you could
Speaker 2: get your message down to Earth so it wasn't getting
Speaker 2: caught in the clouds and stuff like that. And this
Speaker 2: is a similar, yeah, exactly idea.
Speaker 1: Right exactly, And the greenhouse effect is of an effect
Speaker 1: just for this reason that like light passes mostly through
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, but then the Earth absorbs it changes a frequency,
Speaker 1: glows at a lower frequency to which greenhouse gases are opaque, right,
Speaker 1: And so that's why the light can pass in but
Speaker 1: not out because the greenhouse gases are transparent to the
Speaker 1: light coming in and opaque to the light coming out. Right,
Speaker 1: So like the same gases are opaque or transparent to
Speaker 1: different frequencies. Another major issue for interfering is metals. Right,
Speaker 1: any kind of conductor, just like your antenna is going
Speaker 1: to receive the message, it's going to wiggle the electrons
Speaker 1: in your antenna. If you're inside a metal cage with
Speaker 1: your antenna, you're not going to get the signal because
Speaker 1: the metal cage is gonna wiggle its electrons, and it
Speaker 1: wiggles and its electrons in exactly the way to counter
Speaker 1: that field. That's what an antenna does. So the metal
Speaker 1: cage basically eats the signal. And that's why in an
Speaker 1: elevator or anything we call a Faraday cage just a
Speaker 1: metal box, you basically can't get electromagnetic signals or send them.
Speaker 1: This is why people put tinfoil hats on their head.
Speaker 1: There's like actual physical basis.
Speaker 2: That's great. Okay, wow, I never knew they were so smart.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying the CA is trying to control you,
Speaker 1: but if they were a tinfoil hat really would protect you.
Speaker 2: Wow, okay, great, maybe I'm gonna start lining my winter
Speaker 2: hats with tinfoil just in case. Amazing. All right, we're
Speaker 2: gonna take a break, so run to your kitchens, grab
Speaker 2: some tinfoil, and we'll be right back. And we're back
Speaker 2: to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. So we were talking
Speaker 2: about how the frequency of waves can determine what things
Speaker 2: might like get in the way of the signal. Are
Speaker 2: there other things that can like get in the way
Speaker 2: or generate noise or basically mess up the signal in
Speaker 2: some way?
Speaker 1: Yeah, noise is a big issue because your intent is
Speaker 1: not the only thing broadcasting, Like, the universe is variously
Speaker 1: loud at various frequencies because there's other stuff generating electromagnetic radiation,
Speaker 1: and so you want to pick a channel where the
Speaker 1: universe tends to be quieter. Like one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that astronomers look for messages from aliens at one particular
Speaker 1: frequency they call it the watering hole, is because that's
Speaker 1: the one where the universe is pretty quiet, And so
Speaker 1: if you were going to broadcast, that's a good place
Speaker 1: to do it. And so your goal is you want
Speaker 1: to send a message from Californative Virginia, is to either
Speaker 1: find a quiet band where nobody else is broadcasting, or
Speaker 1: to be louder than the noise so that the antenna
Speaker 1: can pick it up above the noise. That's crucial. Nice,
Speaker 1: I can always count on you for two year old humor.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's that's the level I've risen to.
Speaker 1: Nice. Think a two year old say that?
Speaker 2: Oh boy.
Speaker 1: Anyway, So the idea of a signal jammer is actually
Speaker 1: quite simple. It's make a bunch of noise, makes so
Speaker 1: much noise that the person who's trying to receive the
Speaker 1: signal can't hear it over the noise. It's like if
Speaker 1: your sibling is trying to spoil the end of a
Speaker 1: movie and you go l L L. You can't hear them.
Speaker 1: You are jamming their signal. You can't hear their signal
Speaker 1: over the noise that you are making, in this case,
Speaker 1: probably trying to prevent somebody else from getting a signal.
Speaker 1: So you just make a bunch of noise at the
Speaker 1: same frequency where they're trying to hear it, and maybe
Speaker 1: you're closer to the than the original sender is, so
Speaker 1: you can create a bunch of loud noise to make
Speaker 1: it hard for them to hear.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you need to make sure that it's the
Speaker 2: same wavelength so that it's it's not interfering, it's just
Speaker 2: overlapping and making noise exactly.
Speaker 1: And let's pull those two things apart, because a lot
Speaker 1: of the listeners suggested that signal jamming could use destructive interference.
Speaker 1: So let's dig into that for a minute and remind
Speaker 1: ourselves what is destructive interference? While we're thinking about electromagnetic
Speaker 1: signals as waves, waves are complicated and they can interfere. Right,
Speaker 1: you have the double slit experiment. You have also some
Speaker 1: weird optical effects you have like in your living room
Speaker 1: when you're listening to the TV, there's like spots where
Speaker 1: it's louder and quieter at the same distance from the TV.
Speaker 1: What is going on? Remember that waves can add and
Speaker 1: they can subtract. So waves go up and down. Right,
Speaker 1: if you slap on the surface of your bathtub, you
Speaker 1: make waves that are up and down in the surface
Speaker 1: of the water. If you slap with the other hand,
Speaker 1: then those waves overlap with each other. And if one
Speaker 1: wave is going down the same time the other waves
Speaker 1: going up. Then they cancel out. Up plus down equals nothing.
Speaker 1: So this is a destructive interference. It's not like you
Speaker 1: have two waves that are in the same place at
Speaker 1: the same time and you can detect both of them.
Speaker 1: They literally add up to zero, and so they cancel
Speaker 1: each other out. That's destructive interference.
Speaker 2: I miss being a kid. I can't remember the last
Speaker 2: time I took a bath. That was like a thing
Speaker 2: I did when I was eight, But it sounds like
Speaker 2: fun to smack on the surface of a bath and
Speaker 2: play with the waves.
Speaker 1: It's fun. You're doing physics experiments, that's right, But this
Speaker 1: is hard to do. In order for this to happen,
Speaker 1: you have to have two waves that are exactly the
Speaker 1: same height and the same frequency and out of phase
Speaker 1: by one hundred and eighty degrees, which means that like
Speaker 1: one of them is shifted so that it's going down
Speaker 1: when the other one is going up. Otherwise they'll constructively interfere. Right,
Speaker 1: two waves that are both going up at the same
Speaker 1: time will add up to a double wave. Right, And
Speaker 1: so this is hard to arrange. And it's amazing that
Speaker 1: like your noise canceling headphones can do this. What they
Speaker 1: do is they have a little microphone inside them, so
Speaker 1: they detect the sound that's about to hit your ear,
Speaker 1: and then they generate exactly the waves needed to cancel
Speaker 1: out that sound. So the two play on top of
Speaker 1: each other and literally cancel out.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I have a question. So I'm imagining our
Speaker 2: podcast being transmitted and for some crazy, unimaginable reason, someone's
Speaker 2: trying to jam us. Someone doesn't want our message to
Speaker 2: get through, right, Okay, So the wave that's carrying our podcast,
Speaker 2: is it like as we speak, the waves are getting generated,
Speaker 2: so you know, like when I see our audio files
Speaker 2: on like Audacity, are they being generated like that? Or
Speaker 2: is it like there's constant waves being created as the
Speaker 2: message gets sent out across you know, the sky, and
Speaker 2: like at the top of one wave is our cannibalism
Speaker 2: joke and the bottom of the next wave is our
Speaker 2: white chocolate joke. And could I guess what I'm wondering is,
Speaker 2: could you generate a wave to destructively interfere or would
Speaker 2: you need to know what somebody was going to say
Speaker 2: to generate the wave? Like how how complicated would it be?
Speaker 2: Does that question make sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great question. It is complicated, especially because our podcast
Speaker 1: and almost all audio comes at multiple frequencies. Like I
Speaker 1: speak at a range of frequencies. You speak at a
Speaker 1: different range of frequencies. Like my voice would sound very
Speaker 1: different if I only spoke at one frequency. Right, It's
Speaker 1: a whole range. That's what contributes to it sounding like
Speaker 1: me and somebody else sounding like somebody else. That's why,
Speaker 1: like violins sound different from pianos, even if they play
Speaker 1: the same note, right, they have a different like mixture
Speaker 1: of frequencies. So that's the number one that makes it complicated.
Speaker 1: But you're asking, like, do you need to know the
Speaker 1: signal in advance to destructively interfere? And also we're not
Speaker 1: talking about jamming right now. We're talking about destructive interference, right,
Speaker 1: just to clarify what that is. So the best way
Speaker 1: to destructive the interferre is yes, to know exactly what
Speaker 1: the signal is in advance, and to play the diversion
Speaker 1: of it, right, the one that wiggles down instead of up,
Speaker 1: and then it would perfectly cancel out. Usually you know
Speaker 1: as canceling headphones don't know that, right, but they have
Speaker 1: a microphone they listen to the sound, and then they
Speaker 1: calculate what you would need to do to counteract it
Speaker 1: and generate that on the fly.
Speaker 2: That sounds really complicated.
Speaker 1: It's very cool. Yeah, yes, it's incredible, but it only
Speaker 1: works when those two waves overlap very locally. Right. They
Speaker 1: generate that noise so that in your ear the two
Speaker 1: waves go the opposite directions, But those two waves don't
Speaker 1: go the opposite directions everywhere. Right. They generate it so
Speaker 1: that those two waves are out of phase right in
Speaker 1: your ear, but they're not out of phase somewhere else,
Speaker 1: just like you know how when you walk around your
Speaker 1: living room, sometimes the sound constructively interferes, and it's loud,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's quiet, right. That's because phase depends on distance.
Speaker 1: Right where you are in the wiggle or you up
Speaker 1: or down depends on how far you are from the source.
Speaker 1: So you can do destructive interference, and that's an excellent
Speaker 1: way to cancel out somebody signal, but you can only
Speaker 1: do it one place. So if you're the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: and you want to jam like broadcast of Voice of
Speaker 1: America across Europe, there's no way to do that with
Speaker 1: destructive interference, unless you're like buying everybody noise canceling headphones
Speaker 1: and putting them on their head. Each one would have
Speaker 1: to generate a different cancelation signal based on where that
Speaker 1: person is, right, use no way to cancel it broadly
Speaker 1: all over Europe or even over like a two meter span.
Speaker 1: It's very very sensitive and very very localized. So destructive
Speaker 1: interference very cool, very powerful, very amazing technology, but not
Speaker 1: the basis of signal jamming, because you can't do it
Speaker 1: over a broad.
Speaker 2: Area, all right, So destructive interference out not nice.
Speaker 1: Instead, signal jamming is much cruder. It's just your annoying
Speaker 1: siblings shouting in your ear right and so you're right.
Speaker 1: You have to target the right frequency. If Kelly is
Speaker 1: expecting to get a signal from Daniel at a certain frequency,
Speaker 1: then to jam that signal, you just make a bump
Speaker 1: bunch of noise at the same frequency. And you want
Speaker 1: to make it like unpleasant, or you want to make
Speaker 1: it like really loud and uninteresting, you know, to drown
Speaker 1: out the interesting stuff. And so like early jambers from
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, for example, it used to be powered
Speaker 1: by a diesel engine. So like a diesel engine generating
Speaker 1: the electricity, you needed to generate the signal, and they
Speaker 1: were like, well, what signal are we going to send?
Speaker 1: And they decided just to send the sound of that
Speaker 1: diesel engine as the gamming signal at that frequency, So.
Speaker 2: You know, it happened to be the right frequency or
Speaker 2: they adjusted it. They adjusted were down to be the
Speaker 2: right fork.
Speaker 1: They adjusted it, but has like a little bit of
Speaker 1: natural variation which makes it harder to filter out, you know,
Speaker 1: so it's like, yeah, I know. Or other classic choices
Speaker 1: are bagpipes, which I think is just like, you know,
Speaker 1: choosing to weaponize Scottish culture. I mean, you can't send
Speaker 1: haggis over the airwaves, so this is like the second
Speaker 1: best thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah good, Yeah, can you find a third way to
Speaker 2: isolate our Scottish listener, l.
Speaker 1: I'm just speaking to the power of their culture, you know,
Speaker 1: I see, Yeah to be I'm wait, I'm a big
Speaker 1: fan of Scott's I've hired several Scottish post docs. I
Speaker 1: have recently been to Scotland were killed at a great time.
Speaker 1: Love Scotland for the record, Do.
Speaker 2: You love Hagison bagpipes? Daniel, Let's move on, Daniel. Where
Speaker 2: does the phrase jamming come from? Because I don't usually
Speaker 2: think of jamming as meaning like make a lot of
Speaker 2: noise to drown out something else. I think of jamming
Speaker 2: as like, you know, putting a wrench in something to
Speaker 2: stop it all together.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a really fun question because jam
Speaker 1: has so many meanings, right, Like there's a strawberry jam
Speaker 1: you make at the end of the summer. And I
Speaker 1: used to think that that was the connection with signal jamming,
Speaker 1: that like you're throwing a pot of jam onto somebody's
Speaker 1: radar dish or okay, but it's not. It's more like
Speaker 1: a log jam, you know how you can like have
Speaker 1: a traffic jam, things get clogged up, and so signal
Speaker 1: jamming is like clogging up signals. Not making starberry jam,
Speaker 1: or not hanging out and playing the electric guitar with
Speaker 1: your goth friends in the garage in the afternoon, which
Speaker 1: is also another kind of jamming.
Speaker 2: Not or weeby jam. I'm not gonna do anymore singing
Speaker 2: to and I don't want to alienate any other groups
Speaker 2: of people.
Speaker 1: Will move on alienate you're getting invitations. Somebody out there
Speaker 1: was like, that's the voice I need on my hip
Speaker 1: hop album.
Speaker 2: Well, but then I went and sort of almost saying,
Speaker 2: so they're gonna send that invitation immediately. So uh, all right,
Speaker 2: moving moving on.
Speaker 1: But the basic idea is you create a signal that's
Speaker 1: hard to filter. If you're trying to interfere with me
Speaker 1: sending messages to Kelly, for example, and you create noise
Speaker 1: at just one particular frequency, Kelly could just delete that
Speaker 1: from what she's hearing and listen on another frequency. Or
Speaker 1: I can shift my frequency a little bit so it's
Speaker 1: not on the noise frequency.
Speaker 2: And you're gonna talk to me like this instead.
Speaker 1: And so you know, to be effective at jamming, you
Speaker 1: want to do it broadly over a few frequencies, and
Speaker 1: you want to send something that's harder to remove. Like
Speaker 1: we know that noise can be removed. Our amazing audio
Speaker 1: wizard Matt removes noise from these tracks all the time.
Speaker 1: But the hardest noise to remove is like variable noise,
Speaker 1: unpredictable noise. So if you want to be hard to remove,
Speaker 1: you've got to generate unpredictable noise. And that's why like
Speaker 1: bagpipes or diesel engines are better than just like a
Speaker 1: single piercing note.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, are there other ways to jam?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like an arms race of cleverness here some
Speaker 1: people do things like capture the real signal and then
Speaker 1: modify it and tree transmit a deceptive version of it.
Speaker 1: So you know, you're like taking Daniel's message and you're
Speaker 1: adding a bunch of quantum woo to it, and then
Speaker 1: you're sending that to Kelly and she's getting very confused
Speaker 1: because it sounds like Daniel, but it's full of nonsense,
Speaker 1: you know. And so this is like more powerful, more
Speaker 1: subtle signal jamming. But basically all these things are loud
Speaker 1: radio shouters. You know, just be really really loud. And
Speaker 1: the idea is to have your jammer close to the receiver.
Speaker 1: So like you're trying to interfere with the signals sent
Speaker 1: from California to Virginia. See you set up near Kelly's farm.
Speaker 1: You create one of these jammers. You're not gonna interfere
Speaker 1: with my signals going to Hawaii or whatever, but you're
Speaker 1: gonna interfere with Kelly getting the signal because you can
Speaker 1: be louder for Kelly than I am, because you're closer
Speaker 1: to her. These jammers, when they're effective, typically fairly localized.
Speaker 2: Why can't a jammer that's sending like a diesel engine
Speaker 2: sound or whatever, be just as effective as the original message.
Speaker 2: If it's sent out as strongly as the original method.
Speaker 1: It can absolutely if you have that much power to
Speaker 1: send out a really loud jamming message, then yes, and
Speaker 1: we can talk about some examples of that. But typically
Speaker 1: the range depends on the power and the proximity. Like
Speaker 1: you can buy a cheap handhold cellphone jammer that works,
Speaker 1: you know, like thirty to fifty meters, so you can
Speaker 1: walk around in a way that nobody can get a
Speaker 1: phone call or nobody can send you a phone call.
Speaker 1: The military has more powerful jammers that work like, you know,
Speaker 1: hundreds of meters away. But I should note, for I
Speaker 1: talk about these things, these things are totally illegal.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, I was going to ask why more people
Speaker 2: haven't messed with their exes using these things, but okay,
Speaker 2: totally illegal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally legal. And almost every country in the world
Speaker 1: it's illegal to build one of these things, mostly because
Speaker 1: they interfere with emergency communications, right, Like it's hard to
Speaker 1: overcome these things, and if somebody needs to make a
Speaker 1: phone call, a nine one one call or something, you know,
Speaker 1: it could be bad, like there's a guy in two
Speaker 1: thousand and two in France who installed a jammer because
Speaker 1: he was frustrated by his kid's use of phones late
Speaker 1: at night, and he knocked out service for the whole
Speaker 1: town for like hours and hours. And yeah, that guy
Speaker 1: got in a lot of trouble. So, you know, parenting
Speaker 1: gone high tech wrong.
Speaker 2: So how did he get a jammer? Or was he
Speaker 2: like super he made his own jammer because he, you know,
Speaker 2: just kind of knew what he was doing.
Speaker 1: Well, these things are totally legal, but you can buy them.
Speaker 1: People are out there building them and selling them, and
Speaker 1: so yeah, for sure they exist, and you could probably
Speaker 1: even buy one online. It's not that hard. But anybody
Speaker 1: out there who's listening should know these things are totally illegal.
Speaker 1: And so when you get caught, don't say Daniel told
Speaker 1: me how this works and I decided to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, we're we're talking jail time finds rights. Don't
Speaker 2: blame DK. We told you so.
Speaker 1: Exactly. And these things just get more and more sophisticated.
Speaker 1: Our description of messages was essentially how analog messages work.
Speaker 1: You're encoding it somehow directly into the waveform. But modern
Speaker 1: communication is mostly digital right, we're transforming the waves somehow
Speaker 1: into digital signals zeros and ones, which involves some sort
Speaker 1: of binning. Right, so you have thresholds et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And these digital signals also use complex modulation technique, so
Speaker 1: like you're shifting the phase. There's all sorts of back
Speaker 1: and forth between like the receiver and the transmitter. Do
Speaker 1: they recognize each other? You know, okay, I'm ready send
Speaker 1: the signal. Now, okay, I got it. This check sums
Speaker 1: back and forth. It's not as simple as just like
Speaker 1: I'm broadcasting in the clear for anybody to listen to.
Speaker 1: And so more complicated digital signal jammers can be really subtle.
Speaker 1: They can like send a fake handshake to say hey,
Speaker 1: I'm the sender, and they can keep doing that, and
Speaker 1: it like traps the receiver in an infinite loop. It's
Speaker 1: sort of like almost more like hacking than like jamming.
Speaker 1: You're just confusing the receiver so it can't actually hear
Speaker 1: the real.
Speaker 2: Message oh wow. And so you can't like change the
Speaker 2: channel at that point or.
Speaker 1: And so the response is to like shift the channel constantly.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Defense mechanis will get into that in a minute. There
Speaker 1: are approaches to avoid this, But there are other technologies
Speaker 1: that are easier to jam, like Bluetooth and Wi Fi.
Speaker 1: Like if you have many devices, they avoid talking over
Speaker 1: each other. Before your phone transmits via bluetooth, listens be
Speaker 1: a Bluetooth to hear is anybody else transmitting and so
Speaker 1: I'll just wait. So they avoid colliding with each other.
Speaker 1: And so if you just are constantly shouting at that frequency,
Speaker 1: you basically block all Bluetooth. So you can block Wi
Speaker 1: Fi and Bluetooth more easily because they're very polite technologies, right,
Speaker 1: They're avoiding colliding with you. And so if you're just
Speaker 1: really really rude and loud all the time, then a
Speaker 1: continuous transmission like that can effectively block signals.
Speaker 2: No good, We're becoming more vulnerable over time. Lovely, All right, well,
Speaker 2: let's take a break and when we come back, let's
Speaker 2: take a bit of a stroll through jamming history and
Speaker 2: see times that this has been used in the past.
Speaker 2: All right, welcome back to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 2: And now that we're all experts on the science of jamming,
Speaker 2: let's take a little stroll through the history of jamming,
Speaker 2: and Daniel will tell us about when jamming has been
Speaker 2: used in the past.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, we developed electronic transmissions in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundred, so you know, radio and all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, and then it was very very important.
Speaker 1: In World War Two, the radio and radar became very important.
Speaker 1: And radar is just you know, sending out more electromagnetic
Speaker 1: pulses and seeing how they bounce back and using that
Speaker 1: to detect like, you know, jets, et cetera. And so
Speaker 1: radar jamming became very important. You didn't want to be
Speaker 1: spotted when you're zooming in for your bombing sortie, and
Speaker 1: so airplanes could like send out false radar signals, right,
Speaker 1: you send out pulses that make it sound like you
Speaker 1: got bounced back from something else or et cetera. Then
Speaker 1: you could jam radar. If you're just like constantly sending
Speaker 1: pulses at somebody's radar, then they can't hear anything. If
Speaker 1: your planes are coming in but you have another device
Speaker 1: it's like shooting a huge amount of radar specifically at
Speaker 1: that listener, then they can't use their radar to detect
Speaker 1: your planes.
Speaker 2: I guess, as someone who's more of a fish person
Speaker 2: than a bird person, I was thinking of the submarines.
Speaker 2: Were they jamming the submarine radars too?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly the same kind of thing happens for submarines.
Speaker 1: You can also jam radio, like the BBC broadcast over
Speaker 1: the continent, and the Nazis were not big fans of
Speaker 1: the BBC. They thought it was you know, left leaning
Speaker 1: media bias, as we often hear, and so they tried
Speaker 1: to jam that radio essentially just broadcast at the same
Speaker 1: frequency as loudly as possible so that you just can't
Speaker 1: hear the BBC.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And then there's hilarious stories like Russians left minds all
Speaker 1: over Finland, but these were radio activated minds, so it
Speaker 1: could be like remotely detonated. And so the Finns figured
Speaker 1: out what frequency it was, and they played polka music
Speaker 1: continuously for like five months at that same frequency, so
Speaker 1: the Russians couldn't activate their minds, and then by that
Speaker 1: point the battle reason the minds had died.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: I know, I love the polka defense.
Speaker 2: Does polka music come from Finland?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I thought it was more Truman
Speaker 1: I associated more with like Octoberfest, But so I don't
Speaker 1: know why they chose poka music.
Speaker 2: I mean, they must have liked it, right, because they
Speaker 2: were gonna have to listen to it for a long time,
Speaker 2: all right. So after World War Two came the Cold War,
Speaker 2: I'm guessing jamming was important then too.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. So the BBC and the Voice of America
Speaker 1: tried to broadcast into the Soviet Union, and the Soviets
Speaker 1: didn't like that, and so they tried to jam those signals.
Speaker 1: Same way they just like create loud broadcasts at the
Speaker 1: same frequency to interfere. Okay, But it's interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: how well you pick up a distant radio station depends
Speaker 1: a lot on the atmosphere conditions. You know, is there
Speaker 1: a lot of wind between you and there, which changes
Speaker 1: like the density patterns in the air, which creates like
Speaker 1: refractions and reflections. It's sort of like optics. And so
Speaker 1: as the day goes on, you might like hear the
Speaker 1: BBC louder or quieter, or the jam or louder or quieter.
Speaker 1: So you might be able to pick up the BBC
Speaker 1: during some parts of the day during certain weather conditions.
Speaker 1: You know, the jamming is not one hundred percent effective.
Speaker 1: You can also as a defense mechanism use like directional
Speaker 1: antennas the simple model of antenna we talked about before,
Speaker 1: which just like you have a tower, it picks up electrons,
Speaker 1: but you can also build them have a more complex structure,
Speaker 1: so they're better at picking up signals in certain directions.
Speaker 1: Like for example, this microphone I'm talking to. Our audio
Speaker 1: guide tells me that it's a directional microphone. If I
Speaker 1: speak at the front of it, then it picks me
Speaker 1: up better than if I'm speaking at the side of it.
Speaker 1: And that's just because the structure of the electronics inside
Speaker 1: of it that resonates better with a signal from one direction.
Speaker 1: And so if you want to only pick up signals
Speaker 1: from the UK and not from Moscow, you don't want
Speaker 1: to use a general antenna. You want a directional antenna
Speaker 1: helps you overcome the signal jamming a.
Speaker 2: Little bit, except the Soviets would want to pick up
Speaker 2: the message from Moscow and not from the UKA. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I see your point exactly. Well, let's let's go to
Speaker 2: one of the best states in the United States. Let's
Speaker 2: hear about jammers in New Jersey. I was born in
Speaker 2: New Jersey, so I do I do so love New Jersey.
Speaker 1: So as a reminder, jamming is totally illegal. But there
Speaker 1: was a guy in twenty thirteen in New Jersey who
Speaker 1: wanted to evade company tracking. Like he was driving a
Speaker 1: work truck and the company had a GPS tracker on it,
Speaker 1: and he didn't want them to know when he, like
Speaker 1: you know, went in and out or took a nap
Speaker 1: in the side of the turnpike for two hours or whatever.
Speaker 1: So he bought a cheap GPS jammer and he put
Speaker 1: it on his work truck and it worked, but it
Speaker 1: also jammed all the systems at Newark Airport, causing huge
Speaker 1: chaos for airport traffic. And yeah, so he was fined
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollars for creating that hassle. So again,
Speaker 1: these things totally illegal, Do not use them.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's lucky, like planes didn't crash into each
Speaker 2: other and a bunch of people died. He's lucky he
Speaker 2: didn't go to jail or something. But yes, totally illegal, friends, exactly.
Speaker 1: And jamming extends not just on the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 1: You can also interfere with communications into space. Right. A
Speaker 1: lot of our communications these days goes via satellite, and
Speaker 1: satellites require sending messages up to the satellite and then
Speaker 1: receiving messages back down from the satellite. So that's two
Speaker 1: opportunities to interfere with the signals. It's uplink jamming and
Speaker 1: down link jamming.
Speaker 2: Are satellites do you think they're like any more or
Speaker 2: less susceptible because they have like do they have specific
Speaker 2: places where messages are received where that you could like
Speaker 2: sneak up to and jam or everything has that, and
Speaker 2: so that doesn't make them any more susceptible.
Speaker 1: Now they are more and less susceptible. Like on one hand,
Speaker 1: they're less susceptible because they're far away and so like
Speaker 1: if you want to interfere with uplink jamming, then you
Speaker 1: need to really send a powerful signal to get to
Speaker 1: the satellite. Like if you want to interfere with that
Speaker 1: signal from the ground, you send a signal at the
Speaker 1: same frequency, and that's powerful because you could like disrupt
Speaker 1: everybody who's using that satellite if you overwhelm the satellite
Speaker 1: with some signal. But you need a really powerful signal
Speaker 1: to do that to get to the satellite. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, satellites can broadcast over a huge range on
Speaker 1: the surface of the Earth, right, And so if you
Speaker 1: want to mimic satellite transmissions, that's much much harder because
Speaker 1: you'd need to like access where everybody is. And so
Speaker 1: to make it harder for ground receivers to receive those
Speaker 1: messages from satellites is pretty tricky because they have such
Speaker 1: a broad range.
Speaker 2: I thought you said it was going to be easier
Speaker 2: and harder, but it just sounds like it's harder and harder.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, the easier bit actually is. Unfortunately, this is
Speaker 1: pretty easy to do, like if not expensive or complicated
Speaker 1: to interfere with satellite communications. There's a fairly low threshold,
Speaker 1: like technical competency you need to do this, which is
Speaker 1: why we see like interference with satellite communications from lots
Speaker 1: of countries around the world. Indonesia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Libya, Syria,
Speaker 1: all these places have like for military reasons, you know,
Speaker 1: and so does the US of course, you know, technology
Speaker 1: to interfere with satellites. And again this is totally illegal
Speaker 1: in US law and also violates International Telecommunications Union. But
Speaker 1: if you want to buy one, they're like the size
Speaker 1: of a hockey puck, So it's not expensive, it's not complicated,
Speaker 1: it's not even very big, and this is a potentially
Speaker 1: very large issue. The United Nations put out of warning
Speaker 1: calling for urgent protection of radio navigation satellite service to
Speaker 1: support accurate and global navigation and timekeeping. So it's definitely
Speaker 1: a big issue, and it's actually happened, like satellites have
Speaker 1: definitely been jammed.
Speaker 2: Tell us stories, because this kind of stuff keeps me
Speaker 2: up at night, Like if something happens to all of
Speaker 2: our satellites, I mean one, I've been living in Charlottesville,
Speaker 2: Virginia for six years now. I still use my GPS.
Speaker 2: I would be toasted if satellites were you know, out
Speaker 2: of commission tomorrow and I couldn't use GPS anymore.
Speaker 1: Well, I read this hilarious interview with General John Heighten,
Speaker 1: who's head of the Air Force Space Command, and somebody
Speaker 1: asked him if there had been actual instances of satellite jamming,
Speaker 1: and he said that in twenty fifteen there were two
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty one cases where they had been jammed
Speaker 1: from getting information from their satellites down to the ground segment.
Speaker 1: And then the interviewer asked them how many of those
Speaker 1: cases were from like adversaries, you know, bad actors or
Speaker 1: enemies or other governments, and he says zero. Where are
Speaker 1: they coming from? He says, these are almost always self jamming.
Speaker 1: You know, people broadcast. The military is broadcasting constantly in
Speaker 1: all sorts of frequencies, and so they just like are
Speaker 1: not organized enough to not jam themselves. And so he
Speaker 1: thinks that like two hundred times in that one year
Speaker 1: they unwittingly interfered with their own signals because the M
Speaker 1: spectrum is very, very complicated, and like a small mistake
Speaker 1: can create like huge strategic impacts. So this is definitely
Speaker 1: an issue.
Speaker 2: Okay, But presumably Okay, so I don't remember hearing in
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen that we jammed ourselves in something absolutely catastrophic happened,
Speaker 2: So presumably these are mostly minor things that we do
Speaker 2: that happened.
Speaker 1: Exactly a small delay, we can't hear from the satellite,
Speaker 1: We lost the connection of the satellite. What's going on?
Speaker 1: Reboot the machine, Okay, now it's working. That kind of
Speaker 1: situation is what I'm imagining. But there are times in
Speaker 1: conflict zones when this has definitely happened, like Libya in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six jammed a mobile satellite provider called
Speaker 1: Theraa and a long investigation concluded that jamming came from Libya,
Speaker 1: so they decided they were like jam this whole provider
Speaker 1: of mobile satellite communications and.
Speaker 2: Is Therayah a Libyan company? Where they like trying to
Speaker 2: was it a company that the Libyan government didn't like
Speaker 2: or was it some other countries.
Speaker 1: It's not clear. It came from Libya, and the government
Speaker 1: of Libya is one of the shareholders of this company,
Speaker 1: so it's not even really clear exact exactly what the
Speaker 1: motivation was.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: All right, and then in Iran in two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: there's another case of jamming, and of course in conflict
Speaker 1: zones right now, like Russia has been accused of jamming
Speaker 1: GPS signals to interfere with the Ukraine military. And also
Speaker 1: Russia was accused of affecting flights over eastern Europe by
Speaker 1: jamming GPS signals. There was a time when the European
Speaker 1: Commission president her plane was forced to land because signals
Speaker 1: were jammed. She was forced to land in Bulgaria. Wow,
Speaker 1: and they suspected interference by Russia.
Speaker 2: Yikes. For a lot of these things, I wonder how
Speaker 2: hard it is to figure out who did the jamming
Speaker 2: because if you like remove the if you turn off
Speaker 2: the jam or you remove the device. Yeah, it's probably
Speaker 2: hard to know, like did a country jam our stuff
Speaker 2: or did we self jam? And to be clear, I'm
Speaker 2: not trying to be like, well, do we really know
Speaker 2: it's Russia. I'm not trying to exonerate Russia in this
Speaker 2: particular instance or anything. I'm just saying the this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff is hard, which I wonder could make it
Speaker 2: used in war situations more often, just because it's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing that you can, like, you know, say
Speaker 2: oh we didn't do it, prove it, prove it if
Speaker 2: you think we did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because these signals can go really far distances, it's
Speaker 1: hard to tell exactly where they're coming from. And then
Speaker 1: even if you figure out where they were coming from,
Speaker 1: the jammer is not necessarily there anymore. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty effective and pretty easy to hide. But there
Speaker 1: are other things you can do to defend yourself. You
Speaker 1: can increase the power of your signal just be louder
Speaker 1: than the noise. You can use a directional antenna like
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, or you can change frequencies, like instead
Speaker 1: of just broadcasting on one frequency, you can have a
Speaker 1: plan with a person listening to your signal of how
Speaker 1: you're going to change frequencies, Like we can agree on
Speaker 1: a schedule and we'll switch will hop between frequencies. That
Speaker 1: makes it harder.
Speaker 2: To jam, does mean? I mean with satellites you have
Speaker 2: to apply for frequencies through the International Telecommunications Union. So
Speaker 2: I wonder if that makes it hard to have secrets
Speaker 2: for like which frequencies you're going to bounce between, because
Speaker 2: you need to register for the frequencies you're going to
Speaker 2: be using.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but usually you register for a range, and so
Speaker 1: if you move within that range and a specific pattern,
Speaker 1: then it can work. And in fact, this was an
Speaker 1: invention of Hollywood actress Hidie Lamar. She coinvented frequency hopping
Speaker 1: technology back in nineteen forty two to help prevent the
Speaker 1: Nazis from jamming radio guided torpedoes. Yeah, very cool. She's
Speaker 1: a Hollywood actress and a radio frequency genius. And that
Speaker 1: technology is used like now in modern Wi Fi and
Speaker 1: GPS and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, cool way to go.
Speaker 1: And advanced drones also do this to avoid being jammed.
Speaker 1: I mean, if somebody's controlling a drone, they're doing it
Speaker 1: using signals, and if you can jam those signals, they
Speaker 1: can lose control of their drone. Right, So the higher
Speaker 1: end drones have this sort of technology where the controller
Speaker 1: and the drone agree on the frequency schedule, essentially to
Speaker 1: avoid being jammed or to be less susceptible. Interesting, but
Speaker 1: really the best defense against being jammed is to find
Speaker 1: the jammer and turn off the jammer. You know, in
Speaker 1: some way, that's really the best thing you can do.
Speaker 2: When you say turn off the jammer, I guess when
Speaker 2: I think of the jammer, I think of the person
Speaker 2: who's doing the jamming. And I was like, well, Daniel,
Speaker 2: that sounds very intense, but yes, I guess, turn off
Speaker 2: the equipment. But all right, Well, I had fun jamming
Speaker 2: with you today, Daniel, and I learned a lot.
Speaker 1: So that is how signal jamming works. And I hope that
Speaker 1: understanding the physics of this technology gives you more insight
Speaker 1: into how everything around you is working, how they're all
Speaker 1: talking to each other, and how mostly it works seamlessly.
Speaker 1: Even if we get frustrated at our.
Speaker 2: Dishwashers and are electro fishing boats, and.
Speaker 1: If my dishwasher is sentient and is tapped into the
Speaker 1: podcast Network and is listening to this. I'm not apologizing.
Speaker 2: Message to my bosh, you're doing a great job. I
Speaker 2: appreciate you. Thank you for your hard work.
Speaker 1: All right, and you all are doing a great job
Speaker 1: of expanding your minds in this extraordinary universe.
Speaker 2: Thanks everyone, until next time.
Speaker 1: Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and do us a
Speaker 1: favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using.
Speaker 1: It really helps people find us.
Speaker 2: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing
Speaker 2: Matt Kesselman.
Speaker 1: He really is a wizard. You can also find us
Speaker 1: online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and x D and K Universe.
Speaker 1: Come engage with us.
Speaker 2: You can email us at questions at Danielankelly dot org.
Speaker 2: We really do want to hear from you, and you.
Speaker 1: Can find our website www dot danieland Kelly dot org,
Speaker 1: where you'll also find an invitation to join our discord
Speaker 1: where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.
Speaker 2: And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is
Speaker 2: an iHeart podcast. Thanks for joining us.