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Comment by FuckButtons | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if you could use this to overcome electronic warfare jamming of gps.

No, this is about preventing unwanted jamming/interference by a transmitter on frequencies it isn't intending or needing to transmit on as part of the design phase of a product. Overcoming intentional jamming is an entirely different ballgame.

There’s a lot of strategies for this but a basic one is using direction find on the jammer. then electronically or manually moving antenna nulls (bad spots of a directional antenna) to face the jammer(s) which would then increase the gain for directed non-jammer areas.

GPS is a very low amplitude signal that can easily be jammed. Dropping WP (white phosphorus) or a missile on the suspected jammer would be a better bet.

> Dropping WP (white phosphorus)

"Your GPS jammer prevented my war crime so here's a bigger war crime." - The good guys

The use of WP against military targets is not prohibited. A jammer is a military target. As long as it's not causing undue damage to civilians, this is not a war crime.

I don't understand the expected military effect of white phosphorus on a RF jammer though…

You don't understand the expected effect of very hot, inextinguishable fire on an electronic device?

Why do you expect the electronic device to be within reach of the phosphorus in the first place?

The antenna would[1], but the valuable electronics has no reason to be left outside, and practically any amount of concrete, rock or even dirt would protect it from WP.

Also, from your description you're probably confusing WP with termite, which is different (but would be equally inefficient again EW devices for the same reason).

[1]: and with WP you're likely going to just damage the wires and not the antenna itself

I agree, I would rather do plain old HE over WP for a jammer. But either case would not qualify for a war crime.

Depends how close they are from the civilian population, as always.

At least with HE you can limit the damage to the particular place that holds the device, when I'm not familiar with any use of white phosphorus through precision munition (I'm far from a munition expert though, so I may be wrong here).

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