I would think that if you transmitted at the same frequency with more power than the balloon, it would screw up the signal.
I assume the balloon transmitted to a satellite. Were there attempts to jam satellites?
Sure, but that’s not a tall order for the military. They would be up there sniffing the signal to learn about the balloon’s mission. It’s not hard to also transmit a distorted version at whatever power obscures the balloon’s the best. They’re not power limited like the balloon. Or if it’s directional, sit in the line of sight.
I don’t know what they mean by ‘mitigated intelligence collection’ and it they successfully did it, but they must have the capability.
How often do they get non-drill scenarios like this? I imagine a lot of departments were chomping at the bit to participate.
Wait–I thought you were pro-jammer.
Gonna disagree. Here’s why I think it would be a difficult undertaking for anyone.
Let’s start with some assumptions about the balloon I’m fairly comfortable with.
The primary uplink would be to satellites
There would be secondary transmitters talking to friendly ground based receivers.
All transmitters would be frequency hopping so we would have to continuously monitor them and adjust jammers.
It would be transmitting on commercial frequencies so any jamming will adversely affect civilians as well.
It would be talking to commercial satellites. No need to utilize the secret squirrel satellite network when transmitting encrypted data on commercial networks is trivial.
Let’s sprinkle in a bit of physics, specifically the inverse square law. For those not familiar it basically states that the signal strength decreases as the square of the distance… i.e. a signal of strength 1 at one mile would be 1/4 at two miles, 1/9 at three, 1/16 at four, etc.
What that means for a ground based jammer is that it has to overwhelm a transmitter 12 miles above it. The good news is that it doesn’t have to target the balloon, just any potential space based receivers in range. But wait. Those are commercial satellites so we’d be disrupting everyone’s communications. International incident anyone? Then there’s still the matter of the hypothetical ground based listening stations. Easier to jam from the ground thanks to the previously mentioned inverse square law. You just have to have a mobile platform keeping station on the balloon so that spy guy is always in the jamming shadow. Unfortunately the balloon didn’t pack their Rand-McNally road atlas and is just drifting willy-nilly wherever the winds take it.
I’ll stop now, not saying they didn’t take measures, just that stating with 100% certainty that it never phoned home strains credulity. Unless they were able to access transmission logs in the post shootdown analysis and I don’t expect them to admit they did if that was the case.
Iis there such a thing as a small EMP that would kill the balloon’s electronics?
I’m sure this has probably been mentioned up thread.
It would seem instead of trying to jam what the balloon is talking to, it would be much easier to just blast the balloon with noise, so it can’t hear anything interesting. They know where the balloon is, so no guessing the target, and they know what signals they want to keep secret, so they know what frequencies to transmit on.
The balloon may still be able to phone home, but it can’t collect any useful signal information, so it doesn’t really matter.
What has been said is that collection of information was limited because critical assets took action to avoid broadcasting, or moved away from the balloon. So it’s possible there was no jamming at all, just radio silence.
The article below touches on that a bit, but leads with the rumor that the balloon used some US made components.