How do signals get jammed?

Daniel and Kelly explain how signals get jammed, how to avoid being jammed, and whose music makes the best jam. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:21Daniel Whiteson?

  A common trope in science fiction is the strategic move of signal jamming, interfering with your enemy's ability to communicate. My personal favorite example of this is not from Star Wars or from Star Trek, but Spaceballs. When their communications fail, they realize they've been jammed because literal raspberry jam drips across the screen. But is that really how jamming technology works? Or is it more like noise-canceling headphones or something else? Today, we'll dig into the physics of signal jamming, including the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 2:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space.

• 2:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm a big fan of jam.

• 2:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, but not the kind that we're talking about today. Were you in a band or anything in high school?

• 2:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I played the clarinet in a marching band and you could totally not hear anything. And I played the saxophone in a jazz band. So not a very cool kind of band, but yeah, I've been in bands. How about you? You were goth as a teenager, so you were either listening to or performing music, I'm guessing.

• 2:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I played the electric guitar in some grunge rock bands.

• 2:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Pretty awesome.

• 2:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And you were recently invited by a listener to be on their hip hop track.

• 2:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, we'll see where that goes. They said, they said I needed singing experience. So I'm guessing that's going to disqualify me because singing in the car probably doesn't count.

• 3:06Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know. That's experience. Showers and cars.

• 3:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  I guess. We'll see. All right. So my question for you today is, we're talking about like, you know, equipment and when it doesn't work, whether it's, you know, because someone's being malicious or not, that's really frustrating.

• 3:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 3:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  So what piece of equipment in your life has been the most frustrating to you?

• 3:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow. I think the thing I'm most often frustrated by are the things I use most, so like a phone or a computer. But in reality, these things are amazing.

• 3:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Like I use my computer for hours every single day. It's always there. It's almost always works exactly as I expected to. So my frustration there is really unfair. I think the frustration that's most fairly targeted is to the dishwasher. Because like, it's got a simple job. It does one thing. And it just doesn't work a lot of the times, you know? Like, why can't we just invent a dishwasher where you put the dishes in and they get washed?

• 3:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  It does a lot of things, though. It like, it senses how dirty the dishes are. It washes them. It dries them also. That's another thing it does. It does at least two things.

• 4:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Look at you standing up for dishwashers.

• 4:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, they are kind of incredible. They save you a lot of time.

• 4:13Daniel Whiteson?

  When they become AI empowered and take over the world, they're going to listen to this podcast and they're going to know you're one of them.

• 4:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm hedging my bets, man.

• 4:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, as a person who's done a lot of home improvement projects, Kelly, which piece of equipment in your life have you been most frustrated by?

• 4:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, you know, I think I love all of my power tools equally. I think, I think the thing, so I had a piece of equipment I worked with that gave me really big highs and really big lows. And that was the electro fishing boat that I used in grad school. So I was doing a largemouth bass survey in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta. And we were trying to catch largemouth bass and I loved driving this boat. It was so much fun. I loved operating the boat. And when nobody was around at like 4 a.m., when we were putting the boat, you know, like down the ramp and into the delta, that was amazing. But at busy times of day, when I had to like use our giant truck and back

• 5:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  the boat down the ramp, that was the most frustrating because inevitably, some incredibly well-meaning guy would see, oh, a woman is trying to back the boat down the ramp and they never were helping the guys. It was only when I was trying, and again, they were trying to be very nice.

• 5:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 5:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I appreciated their help, but it wasn't really helping because I did a great job on my own. But when they were trying to tell me, I would get really flustered because, you know, you turn the, you know, the wheel in one direction, the boat goes in the opposite direction. And when somebody is trying to tell you like, go that way, it gets more confusing. I was doing fine on my own, but whenever somebody would try to help me, that's when I would mess it up. I just wanted to like leave my window rolled up and be like, no, I'm not listening to you. But then that would have been rude. And so anyway, that was my most frustrating equipment experience was trying to get the boat down the ramp when people were around. And again, I wasn't mad at them. They were trying to help. That was nice.

• 6:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And you're not even mad at the equipment, right?

• 6:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I'm not even mad at the equipment. It was just like, it was just a very frustrating experience. Every time I'd pull up to the boat ramp, I'd get like anxious if there was anybody else there. But that's why I really liked being on the crew that would start at like 4 a.m. because usually there was no one else there and I could just whoop and one like fell swoop, get it down and then we'd be in the water and we'd go out and we'd collect our fish.

• 6:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we aren't all out on the water at 4 a.m. to collect fish, but almost everybody lives a life that's dominated by machines, electronic devices that enable your life and make it easier or more complicated, or just more fun. And sometimes they don't work just because they're busted or it's user error, but sometimes it's malicious.

• 6:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 6:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Somebody out there is interfering with your use of your devices. And today, we're going to talk about one of those modes of interference, signal jamming, which appears all over the place in popular media and science fiction. And a bunch of people wrote in and said, hey, can you explain what is signal jamming?

• 7:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm glad that they did because I love hearing stuff like this explained by Daniel. You'll get the clearest explanation when Daniel's the one explaining it. But let's go ahead and ask our extraordinaries, you know, the ones who didn't write in to ask for a better explanation. How does a signal jammer work? And here's what they had to say.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  You have a wave that's getting canceled out by another wave.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  They probably emit electromagnetic waves at just the right frequency to be perfectly deconstructive to other waves.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  By inserting destructive interference, essentially the inverse waves of any intended communication, thus making it be unintelligible. Kind of how noise cancelling headphones insert anti-noise to negate out any undesirable outside noise.

• 7:59Speaker 07

  I have no idea how a signal jammer works. My best guess would be that it uses photons in some way, scrambling the radio waves. I don't know. Some sort of particle wave disrupting the others, but it needs to be a superior particle wave. Can you hit a particle wave with another particle wave?

• 8:21Speaker 04

  By sending a bunch of random data of the same signal type that screws up the receiver so it doesn't know what data is real and what's fake.

• 8:29Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. I love the idea of superior particles that you can like zap one kind of particle, another kind of particle, and it'll be dominated.

• 8:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice. Yes. That is pretty epic.

• 8:39Daniel Whiteson?

  The way you say nice reminds me that this weekend I was hanging out with a two-year-old and she's in this phase of just like picking up words. And something happened. She like dropped a marble right under her mom's eye. And I said, nice. And then every time she did something mischievous the whole evening, she went, nice.

• 9:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And I laughed my head off. Anyway, these are very nice responses. And the theme that emerges for me is that a lot of people think it's destructive interference. They think it's this fancy wave cancellation stuff, like the thing happening with your noise cancellation headphones. So I think it's great that we're going to dig into the actual mechanics of how signal jamming works because hint, hint, it's not destructive interference.

• 9:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  What? All right. So how are messages actually sent?

• 9:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So to understand how signals are jammed, we have to understand the physics of signals. And for this conversation, we're going to ignore quantum mechanics because you mostly can. And as a reminder, you know, anytime we do physics, we're always using a simplified description of the universe. We can't bring all of our knowledge to bear all at once because number one, we don't need to. And number two, then we'd get nothing done ever because we'd be solving Einstein's equations in impossible ways. So we're always just like choosing what aspects of physics to use and neglecting some little bits. And for this conversation, we can treat this like classical electromagnetism. So we have electric fields and magnetic fields and oscillations within them. And we can ignore like quantum pulses and fuzziness and all that kind of stuff. Okay.

• 10:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, you know, and we only have an hour. So, so are we?

• 10:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  And when we talk about messages, are we talking about like radio messages, cell phone messages? Or are those all kind of the same thing?

• 10:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Those are all kind of the same thing. Everything here is a signal that's transmitted wirelessly, which means it's a pulse in the electromagnetic field, right? And so we're going to talk about messages encoded as pulses in the electromagnetic field, which basically means you're sending light, invisible light or visible light of various frequencies, right? And so when you listen to your radio, for example, you're getting radio waves. Radio waves are oscillations in the electromagnetic field that are picked up by your radio. When you listen to your cell phone, you're getting cellular information. That's oscillations of the electromagnetic field, just at a different frequency. When you used to watch TV with antennas, you were picking up signals over the air, which are just oscillations in the electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic field.

• 11:10Daniel Whiteson?

  When you tap your credit card on something to pay for it, there's a little bit of electromagnetic information being passed back and forth. So all of these things are electromagnetic, right? So all these messages are electromagnetic. They're just oscillations in the electromagnetic field.

• 11:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 11:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And the way that you send them is an antenna, right? So let's think about what is the physics of an antenna? It's like a long cylinder of metal. It's got a bunch of electrons in there, right? And you apply some current to the electrons to move one way and the electrons to move the other way. Now electrons have an electric charge, right? And so they make an electric field. So if an antenna is just sitting there, it has an electric field. And if you pull on the electrons to move them, the electric field changes because you're moving the electrons. The electric field moves with the electrons, right? That makes sense? So if you have one electron, for example, and you wiggle it, what happens? Well, instead of having the same electric field through time, now that electric field is changing. I move the electron, electric field moves with it, right?

• 12:10Daniel Whiteson?

  All cool. But if I move my electron here in California, can Kelly tell immediately that I've moved my electron? No, she can only tell when the new electric field gets to her. So there's a time delay. If I wiggle my electron up and down, then I create a wiggling electric field through time that eventually gets to Kelly and she can pick it up with her electric field measuring device. Does that make sense?

• 12:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That does.

• 12:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 12:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's kind of amazing that wiggling electric fields can give you like music and complicated.

• 12:42Daniel Whiteson?

  I know.

• 12:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's crazy.

• 12:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and so all of this information is just encoded in wiggling electric fields, which create magnetic fields. And that's what light is, right? Light is a coupled oscillation between electric fields and magnetic fields. They're very tightly linked. And changing electric fields make magnetic fields. Changing magnetic fields make electric fields. So it's this incredible physical phenomena that you can send information through the universe if they're in these fields. And as you say, it's really cool that you can use those wiggles to represent almost any kind of information, right? You can like encode my voice, you can send data. You know, you can send anything essentially if you just come up with some way to encode it. You say this kind of wiggle means that this other kind of wiggle means something else.

• 13:28Daniel Whiteson?

  And then you can use that to transmit information. And so the basic physical setup is you have an antenna where you are controlling the electrons, which means you control the wiggles. And somebody else, the receiver Kelly has an antenna. And when the electric field arrives at Kelly, how does she know that it's changed? Well, her antennas electrons get wiggled by the electric field. For the same reason that wiggling my electrons makes a wiggling electric field. That wiggling electric field, when it arrives at Kelly's antenna, it wiggles her electrons. Then she has the electronics to pick up those wiggles as current, and that's her signal. So effectively, I send a signal in my electronics to a signal in Kelly's electronics. That's how message transmission works.

• 14:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and this works because like, so these messages need to pass through like buildings and forests and stuff like that. And does some of it get lost as it passes through that? Or no, because electrons and their fields just go through stuff? Or do, yeah?

• 14:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. The answer is yes and no. It depends on the frequency. So for example, if you're doing radio, then your frequencies are like kilohertz or megahertz. Right? When you're listening to like rock 107.9, 107.9 means 107.9 megahertz is the frequency of that signal. When you're using wifi, then it's like 2.4 or 5 gigahertz, right? Those are hertz, those are frequencies. It tells you how many times the signal oscillates per second. 5 gigahertz is 5 billion oscillations per second.

• 15:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 15:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Cell phones use like 600 megahertz to like 50 gigahertz. So each one has a different frequency range and different frequencies behave differently. Just the same way that like different frequencies of light are either visible or invisible and different stuff is transparent or opaque. Like X rays pass right through your soft muscle tissue, but they don't pass through bone. And light, visible light doesn't pass through soft muscle tissue, right? So different. Things are transparent to different frequencies. In general, shorter frequency stuff like cell phones and Wi-Fi has shorter ranges than longer frequency stuff like radio. There's less atmospheric absorption, like the atmosphere is more transparent to radio

• 15:45Daniel Whiteson?

  than it is to Wi-Fi and cell towers, so it doesn't fizzle out as much. And radio is less sensitive to like small obstacles. Radio can also bounce off the atmosphere sometimes, depending on the frequency. And so it's easier to like pick up radio from miles and miles away. Or, you know, like ham radio operators can talk to people from around the world using those frequencies, whereas you can never do that with like cellphone towers. But cellphone towers are designed to only cover like the region that you're in. You don't want to hear from other cellphone towers.

• 16:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. I feel like I remember when we had a conversation about space-based solar. We were talking about frequencies, like what frequency would you pick so that you could get your message down to earth so it wasn't getting caught in the clouds and stuff like that? And this is a similar

• 16:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Idea, right?

• 16:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And the greenhouse effect is an effect just for this reason, that like light passes mostly through the atmosphere, but then the earth absorbs it, changes the frequency, glows at a lower frequency to which greenhouse gases are opaque, right? And so that's why the light can pass in but not out, because the greenhouse gases are transparent to the light coming in and opaque to the light coming out, right? So like the same gases are opaque or transparent to different frequencies. Another major issue for interfering is metals, right? Any kind of conductor, just like your antenna is going to receive the message, it's going to wiggle the electrons in your antenna. If you're inside a metal cage with your antenna, you're not going to get the signal, because the metal cage is going to wiggle its electrons, and it wiggles its electrons in exactly the way to counter that field.

• 17:19Daniel Whiteson?

  That's what an antenna does. So the metal cage basically eats the signal, and that's why in an elevator, or anything we call a Faraday cage, just a metal box, you basically can't get electromagnetic signals or send them. This is why people put tinfoil hats on their head. There's like actual physical basis for this.

• 17:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's great. Okay. Wow, I never knew they were so smart.

• 17:42Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not saying the CIA is trying to control you, but if they were, a tinfoil hat really would protect you.

• 17:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. Okay, great. Maybe I'm gonna start lining my winter hats with tinfoil, just in case. Amazing.

• 17:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're gonna take a break, so run to your kitchens, grab some tin foil, and we'll be right back.

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• 21:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. So we were talking about how the frequency of waves can determine what things might like get in the way of the signal. Are there other things that can like get in the way or generate noise or basically mess up the signal in some way?

• 21:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, noise is a big issue because your antenna is not the only thing broadcasting. Like, the universe is variously loud at various frequencies because there's other stuff generating electromagnetic radiation. And so you want to pick a channel where the universe tends to be quieter. Like, one of the reasons that astronomers look for messages from aliens at one particular frequency, they call it the watering hole, is because that's the one where the universe is pretty quiet. And so if you were going to broadcast, that's a good place to do it. And so your goal, if you want to send a message from California to Virginia, is to either find a quiet band where nobody else is broadcasting or to be louder than the noise so that the antenna can pick it up above the noise. That's crucial.

• 22:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice.

• 22:08Daniel Whiteson?

  I can always count on you for two-year-old humor. Thank you.

• 22:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. That's, that's the level I've risen to.

• 22:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Nice. Seeing a two-year-old say that. Oh, boy. Anyway, so the idea of a signal jammer is actually quite simple. It's make a bunch of noise. Make so much noise that the person who's trying to receive the signal can't hear it over the noise. It's like if your sibling is trying to spoil the end of a movie and you go, you can't hear them. You are jamming their signal. You can't hear their signal over the noise that you are making. In this case, probably trying to prevent somebody else from getting a signal. So you just make a bunch of noise at the same frequency where they're trying to hear it. And maybe you're closer to the receiver than the original sender is. So you can create a bunch of loud noise to make it hard for them to hear.

• 22:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So you need to make sure that it's the same wavelength so that it's, it's not interfering. It's just overlapping and making noise.

• 23:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And let's pull those two things apart because a lot of the listeners suggested the signal jamming could use destructive interference. So let's dig into that for a minute and remind ourselves, what is destructive interference? Well, we're thinking about electromagnetic signals as waves. Waves are complicated and they can interfere, right? You have the double slit experiment. You have all sorts of weird optical effects. You have like in your living room, when you're listening to the TV, there's like spots where it's louder and quieter at the same distance from the TV. What is going on? Remember that waves can add and they can subtract. So waves go up and down, right? If you slap on the surface of your bathtub, you make waves that are up and down in the surface of the water. You slap with the other hand, then those waves overlap with each other. And if one wave is going

• 23:50Daniel Whiteson?

  down, the same time the other wave is going up, then they cancel out. Up plus down equals nothing. So this is destructive interference. It's not like you have two waves that are in the same place at the same time and you can detect both of them. They literally add up to zero. And so they cancel each other out. That's destructive interference.

• 24:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  I miss being a kid. I can't remember the last time I took a bath. That was like a thing I did when I was eight.

• 24:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  But it sounds like fun to smack on the surface of a bath and play with the waves.

• 24:17Daniel Whiteson?

  It is fun. You're doing physics experiments.

• 24:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's all right.

• 24:20Daniel Whiteson?

  But this is hard to do. In order for this to happen, you have to have two waves that are exactly the same height and the same frequency and out of phase by 180 degrees, which means that like one of them is shifted so that it's going down when the other one is going up. Otherwise, they'll constructively interfere, right? Two waves that are both going up at the same time will add up to a double wave, right? And so this is hard to arrange. And it's amazing that like your noise cancelling headphones can do this. What they do is they have a little microphone inside them. So they detect the sound that's about to hit your ear and then they generate exactly the waves needed to cancel out that sound. So the two play on top of each other and literally cancel out.

• 25:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so I have a question. So I'm imagining our podcast being transmitted. And for some crazy unimaginable reason, someone's trying to jam us. Someone doesn't want our message to get through.

• 25:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 25:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right? Okay, so the wave that's carrying our podcast.

• 25:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is it like as we speak, the waves are getting generated? So you know, like when I see our audio files on like Audacity, are they being generated like that? Or is it like there's constant waves being created as the message gets sent out across, you know, the sky? And like at the top of one wave is our cannibalism joke and the bottom of the next wave is our white chocolate joke. And could, I guess what I'm wondering is could you generate a wave to destructively interfere? Or would you need to know what somebody was going to say to generate the wave? Like, how complicated would it be? Does that question make sense?

• 26:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. It is complicated, especially because our podcast and almost all audio comes at multiple frequencies. Like I speak at a range of frequencies. You speak at a different range of frequencies. Like my voice would sound very different if I only spoke at one frequency, right? There's a whole range that contributes to it sounding like me and somebody else sounding like somebody else. That's why like violins sound different from pianos, even if they play the same note, right? They have a different like mixture of frequencies. So that's number one. That makes it complicated, but you're asking like, do you need to know the signal in advance to destructively interfere? And also, we're not talking about jamming right now. We're talking about destructive interference, right? Just to clarify what that is. So the best way to destructively interfere is yes, to know exactly what the signal is

• 26:48Daniel Whiteson?

  in advance and to play the anti-version of it, right? The one that wiggles down instead of up, and then it would perfectly cancel out. Usually, your noise-canceling headphones don't know that, right? But they have a microphone, they listen to the sound, and then they calculate what you would need to do to counteract it and generate that on the fly.

• 27:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  That sounds really complicated.

• 27:08Daniel Whiteson?

  It's very cool.

• 27:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, it's incredible. But it only works when those two waves overlap very locally, right? They generate that noise so that in your ear, the two waves go the opposite directions.

• 27:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 27:21Daniel Whiteson?

  But those two waves don't go the opposite directions everywhere, right? They generate it so that those two waves are out of phase right in your ear, but they're not out of phase somewhere else. Just like, you know how when you walk around your living room, sometimes the sound constructively interferes and it's loud, sometimes it's quiet, right? That's because phase depends on distance, right? Where you are in the wiggle, are you up or down, depends on how far you are from the source. So you can do destructive interference, and that's an excellent way to cancel out somebody's signal, but you can only do it one place. So if you're the Soviet Union and you want to jam, like broadcast a voice of America across Europe, there's no way to do that with destructive interference unless you're like buying everybody noise-canceling headphones and putting them on their head.

• 28:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Each one would have to generate a different cancellation signal based on where that person is, right? There's no way to cancel it broadly all over Europe or even over like a two-meter span. It's very, very sensitive and very, very localized. So destructive interference, very cool, very powerful, very amazing technology, but not the basis of signal jamming because you can't do it over a broad area.

• 28:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So destructive interference out. Not nice.

• 28:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Instead, signal jamming is much cruder. It's just your annoying sibling shouting in your ear. Right? And so you're right, you have to target the right frequency. If Kelly is expecting to get a signal from Daniel at a certain frequency, then to jam that signal, you just make a bunch of noise at the same frequency. And you want to make it unpleasant or you want to make it like really loud and uninteresting. You know, to drown out the interesting stuff. And so like early jammers from the Soviet Union, for example, they used to be powered by diesel engine. So like a diesel engine generating the electricity you needed to generate the signal. And they were like, well, what signal are we going to send? And they decided just to send the sound of that diesel engine as the jamming signal at that frequency. So, you know.

• 29:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cause it just happened, it happened to be the right frequency or they adjusted it.

• 29:22Daniel Whiteson?

  They adjusted.

• 29:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or down to be the right frequency.

• 29:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. They adjusted it, but it has like a little bit of natural variation, which makes it harder to filter out. You know, so it's like a.

• 29:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Good sound effects.

• 29:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I know. Or other classic choices are bagpipes, which I think is just like, you know, choosing to weaponize Scottish culture.

• 29:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not cool.

• 29:43Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you can't send haggis over the airwaves. So this is like the second best thing.

• 29:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah. Good. Yeah. Can you find a third way to isolate our Scottish listeners, Daniel?

• 29:53Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm just speaking to the power of their culture, you know?

• 29:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I see. Yeah. To be.

• 29:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm a, I'm a big fan of Scots. I've hired several Scottish postdocs. I've recently been to Scotland and were killed at a great time. Love Scotland for the record.

• 30:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you love haggis and bagpipes, Daniel?

• 30:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's move on.

• 30:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, where does the phrase jamming come from? Because I don't usually think of jamming as meaning like make a lot of noise to drown out something else. I think of jamming as like, you know, putting a wrench in something to stop it altogether.

• 30:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. I mean, this is a really fun question because jam is so many meanings, right? Like there's the strawberry jam. You make it the end of the summer.

• 30:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And I used to think that that was the connection with signal jamming. That like you were throwing a pot of jam onto somebody's radar dish or whatever.

• 30:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 30:46Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's not. It's more like a log jam. You know how you can like have a traffic jam? Things get clogged up. And so signal jamming is like clogging up signals, not making strawberry jam or not hanging out and playing the electric guitar with your goth friends in the garage in the afternoon, which is also another kind of jamming.

• 31:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not or we be jamming. I'm not gonna do any more singing to and I don't want to alienate any other groups of people. We'll move on.

• 31:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Alienate, you're getting invitations. Somebody out there was like, that's the voice I need on my hip hop album.

• 31:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, but then I went and sort of almost sang. So they're gonna rescind that invitation immediately. So, uh, all right, moving, moving on.

• 31:25Daniel Whiteson?

  But the basic idea is you create a signal that's hard to filter. If you're trying to interfere with me sending messages to Kelly, for example, and you create noise at just one particular frequency, Kelly could just delete that from what she's hearing and listen on another frequency, or I can shift my frequency a little bit. So it's not on the noise frequency.

• 31:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you're gonna talk to me like this instead? Something like that?

• 31:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, you know, to be effective at jamming, you want to do it broadly over a few frequencies. And you want to send something that's harder to remove. Like, we know that noise can be removed. Our amazing audio wizard, Matt, removes noise from these tracks all the time, but the hardest noise to remove is like variable noise, unpredictable noise. So if you want to be hard to remove, you gotta generate unpredictable noise. And that's why like bagpipes or diesel engines are better than just like a single piercing note.

• 32:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. All right. Are there other ways to jam?

• 32:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's like an arms race of cleverness here. Some people do things like capture the real signal and then modify it and retransmit a deceptive version of it. So, you know, you're like taking Daniel's message and you're adding a bunch of quantum woo to it. And then you're sending that to Kelly and she's getting very confused because it sounds like Daniel, but it's full of nonsense. You know, and so this is like more powerful, more subtle signal jamming. But basically, all of these things are loud radio shouters. You know, just be really, really loud. And the idea is to have your jammer close to the receiver. So like you're trying to interfere with the signal sent from California to Virginia. So you set up near Kelly's farm, you create one of these jammers. You're not going to interfere with my signals going to Hawaii or whatever.

• 33:10Daniel Whiteson?

  But you're going to interfere with Kelly getting the signal because you can be louder for Kelly than I am because you're closer to her. These jammers, when they're effective, typically fairly localized.

• 33:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why can't a jammer that's sending like a diesel engine sound or whatever, be just as effective as the original message? If it's sent out as strongly as the original method?

• 33:33Daniel Whiteson?

  It can absolutely. If you have that much power to send out a really loud jamming message, then yes. And we can talk about some examples of that.

• 33:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 33:40Daniel Whiteson?

  But typically the range depends on the power and the proximity. Like you can buy a cheap handheld cellphone jammer that works, you know, like 30 to 50 meters. So you can walk around in a way that nobody can get a phone call or nobody can send you a phone call. The military has more powerful jammers that work like, you know, hundreds of meters away. But I should note before I talk about these things, these things are totally illegal.

• 34:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, okay. I was gonna ask why more people haven't messed with their exes using these things, but okay, totally illegal.

• 34:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, totally legal. In almost every country in the world, it's illegal to build one of these things. Mostly because they interfere with emergency communications.

• 34:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 34:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? Like it's hard to overcome these things. And if somebody like needs to make a phone call, a 911 call or something, you know, it could be bad. Like there's a guy in 2002 in France who installed a jammer because he was frustrated by his kid's use of phones late at night. And he knocked out service for the whole town for like hours and hours. And yeah, that guy got in a lot of trouble.

• 34:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 34:44Daniel Whiteson?

  So, you know, parenting gone, high tech wrong.

• 34:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So how did he get a jammer? Or was he like super smart and he made his own jammer because he know, you know, just kind of knew what he was doing?

• 34:54Daniel Whiteson?

  These things are totally illegal, but you can buy them.

• 34:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 34:58Daniel Whiteson?

  People are out there building them and selling them. And so, yeah, for sure, they exist. And you could probably even buy one online. It's not that hard. But anybody out there who's listening should know these things are totally illegal. And so when you get caught, don't say, Daniel told me how this works and I decided to do it.

• 35:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, we're talking jail time, fines, rights. Don't blame D K E U. We told you so.

• 35:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And these things just get more and more sophisticated. Our description of messages was essentially how analog messages work. You're encoding it somehow directly into the waveform. But modern communication is mostly digital, right? We're transforming the wave somehow into digital signals, zeros and ones, which involves some sort of binning, right? So you have thresholds, et cetera, et cetera. And these digital signals also use complex modulation techniques. So like you're shifting the phase. There's all sorts of back and forth between like the receiver and the transmitter. Do they recognize each other? You know, okay, I'm ready. Send the signal now. Okay, I got it. This check sums back and forth. It's not as simple as just like I'm broadcasting in the clear for anybody to listen to.

• 36:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And so more complicated digital signal jammers can be really subtle. They can like send a fake handshake to say, hey, I'm the sender. And they can keep doing that and it like traps the receiver in an infinite loop. It's sort of like, almost more like hacking than like jamming. You're just confusing the receiver so it can't actually hear the real message.

• 36:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wow. And so you can't like change the channel at that point or?

• 36:31Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the response is to like shift the channel constantly. You know, defense mechanisms, we'll get into that in a minute. There are approaches to avoid this. But there are other technologies that are easier to jam like Bluetooth and Wi Fi. Like if you have many devices, they avoid talking over each other. Before your phone transmits via Bluetooth, it listens via Bluetooth to hear, is anybody else transmitting? If so, I'll just wait. So they avoid colliding with each other. And so if you just are constantly shouting at that frequency, you basically block all Bluetooth. So you can block Wi Fi and Bluetooth more easily because they're very polite technologies, right? They're avoiding colliding with you.

• 37:10Daniel Whiteson?

  And so if you're just really, really rude and loud all the time, then a continuous transmission like that can effectively block signals.

• 37:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, good. We're becoming more vulnerable over time. Lovely. All right. Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, let's take a bit of a stroll through jamming history and see times that this has been used in the past.

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• 39:36Daniel Whiteson?

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• 40:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, welcome back to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. And now that we're all experts on the science of jamming, let's take a little stroll through the history of jamming. And Daniel will tell us about when jamming has been used in the past.

• 40:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so, you know, we developed electronic transmissions in the early 1900s. So, you know, radio and all this kind of stuff. And then it was very, very important in World War II. The radio and radar became very important. And radar is just, you know, sending out more electromagnetic pulses and seeing how they bounce back and using that to detect like, you know, jets, et cetera. And so radar jamming became very important. You didn't want to be spotted when you're zooming in for your bombing sortie. And so airplanes could like send out false radar signals, right? You send out pulses and make it sound like you got bounced back from something else or et cetera. Then you could jam radar. If you're just like constantly sending pulses at somebody's radar, then they can't hear anything. If your planes are coming in,

• 41:22Daniel Whiteson?

  but you have another device that's like shooting a huge amount of radar specifically at that listener, then they can't use their radar to detect your planes.

• 41:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I guess, as someone who's more of a fish person than a bird person, I was thinking of the submarines. Were they, were they jamming the submarine radars too?

• 41:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. The same kind of thing happens for submarines. You can also jam radio, like the BBC broadcast over the continent. And the Nazis were not big fans of the BBC. They thought it was, you know, left-leaning media bias.

• 41:54Daniel Whiteson?

  As we often hear, and so they tried to jam that radio essentially just broadcast at the same frequency as loudly as possible, so that you just can't hear the BBC.

• 42:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 42:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And then this hilarious story is like Russians left mines all over Finland, but these were radio activated mines, so it could be like remotely detonated. And so the Finns figured out what frequency it was and they played polka music continuously for like five months at that same frequency. So the Russians couldn't activate their mines. And then by that point, the batteries in the mines had died.

• 42:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing.

• 42:28Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. I love the polka defense.

• 42:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does polka music come from Finland?

• 42:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't think so. I thought it was more German. I associated more with like Oktoberfest, but so I don't know why it chose polka music.

• 42:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, they must have liked it, right? Cause they were gonna have to listen to it for a long time. Alright, so after World War II came the Cold War. I'm guessing jamming was important then too?

• 42:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. So the BBC and the Voice of America tried to broadcast into the Soviet Union and the Soviets didn't like that. And so they tried to jam those signals. Same way, they just like create loud broadcasts at the same frequency to interfere.

• 43:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 43:08Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's interesting because you know, how well you pick up a distant radio station depends a lot on the atmospheric conditions. You know, is there a lot of wind between you and there, which changes like the density patterns in the air, which creates like refractions and reflections. It's sort of like optics. And so as the day goes on, you might like hear the BBC louder or quieter, or the jammer louder or quieter. So you might be like pick up the BBC during some parts of the day during certain weather conditions. You know, the jamming is not a hundred percent effective. You can also as a defense mechanism use like directional antennas. The simple model of antenna we talked about before, which is like you have a tower, it picks up electrons, but you can also build them to have a more complex structure

• 43:49Daniel Whiteson?

  so that they're better at picking up signals in certain directions. Like for example, this microphone I'm talking to, our audio guy tells me that it's a directional microphone. If I speak at the front of it, then it picks me up better than if I'm speaking at the side of it. And that's just because of the structure of the electronics inside of it, they resonate better with a signal from one direction. And so if you want to only pick up signals from the UK and not from Moscow, you don't want to use a general antenna. You want a directional antenna helps you overcome the signal jamming a little bit.

• 44:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Except the Soviets would want to pick up the message from Moscow and not from the UK. But, but yes, I see your point.

• 44:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 44:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, let's, let's go to one of the best states in the United States. Let's, let's hear about jammers in New Jersey. I was born in New Jersey, so I do, I do so love New Jersey.

• 44:39Daniel Whiteson?

  So as a reminder, jamming is totally illegal. But there was a guy in 2013 in New Jersey who wanted to evade company tracking. Like he was driving a work truck and the company had a GPS tracker on it. And he didn't want them to know when he like, you know, went in and out or took a nap in the side of the turnpike for two hours or whatever. So he bought a cheap GPS jammer and he put it on his work truck and it worked. But it also jammed all the systems at Newark Airport, causing huge chaos for airport traffic. And yeah, so he was fined tens of thousands of dollars for creating that hassle. So again, these things totally illegal, do not use them.

• 45:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, he's lucky, like planes didn't crash into each other and a bunch of people died. He's lucky he didn't go to jail or something, but uh, yes, totally illegal friends.

• 45:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And jamming extends not just on the surface of the earth. You could also interfere with communications into space, right? A lot of our communications these days goes via satellite. And satellites require sending messages up to the satellite and then receiving messages back down from the satellite. So that's two opportunities to interfere with the signals is uplink jamming and downlink jamming.

• 45:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are satellites, do you think they're, they're like any more or less susceptible? Because they have like, do they have specific places where messages are received where you could like sneak up to and jam? Or everything has that? And so that doesn't make them any more susceptible?

• 46:08Daniel Whiteson?

  No, they are more and less susceptible. Like on one hand, they're less susceptible because they're far away. And so like, if you want to interfere with uplink jamming, then you need to really send a powerful signal to get to the satellite. Like if you want to interfere with that signal from the ground, you send a signal at the same frequency. And that's powerful because you could like disrupt everybody who's using that satellite if you. overwhelm the satellite with some signal, but you need a really powerful signal to do that to get to the satellite. On the other hand, satellites can broadcast over a huge range on the surface of the earth, right? And so if you want to mimic satellite transmissions, that's much, much harder because you'd need to like access where everybody is. And so to

• 46:49Daniel Whiteson?

  like make it harder for ground receivers to receive those messages from satellites is pretty tricky because they have such a broad range.

• 46:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought you said it was going to be easier and harder, but it just sounds like it's harder and harder.

• 47:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, the easier bit actually is unfortunately, this is pretty easy to do. Like it's not expensive or complicated to interfere with satellite communications. There's a fairly low threshold, like technical competency you need to do this, which is why we see like interference with satellite communications from lots of countries around the world. Indonesia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Libya, Syria, all these places have like for military reasons, you know, and so does the US, of course, you know, technology to interfere with satellites. And again, this is totally illegal in US law and also violates International Telecommunications Union. But if you want to buy one, they're like the size of a hockey puck. So it's not

• 47:47Daniel Whiteson?

  expensive. It's not complicated. It's not even very big. And this is a potentially very large issue. The United Nations put out a warning calling for urgent protection of radio navigation satellite service to support accurate and global navigation and timekeeping. So it's definitely a big issue and it's actually happened. Like satellites have definitely been jammed.

• 48:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Tell us stories because this, this kind of stuff keeps me up at night. Like if something happens to all of our satellites. I mean, one, I've been living in Charlottesville, Virginia for six years now. I still use my GPS. I would be toast if satellites were, you know, out of commission tomorrow and I couldn't use GPS anymore.

• 48:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I read this hilarious interview with General John Hyten, who's head of the Air Force Space Command. And somebody asked him if there had been actual instances of satellite jamming. And he said that in 2015, there were 261 cases where they had been jammed from getting information from their satellites down to the ground segment. And then the interviewer asked them, how many of those cases were from like adversaries, you know, bad actors or enemies or other governments? And he says, zero.

• 48:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  What? And where are they coming from?

• 49:01Daniel Whiteson?

  He says, these are almost always self jamming. People broadcast, the military is broadcasting constantly at all sorts of frequencies. And so they just like are not organized enough to not jam themselves. And so he thinks that like 200 times in that one year, they unwittingly interfered with their own signals. Because the EM spectrum is very, very complicated. And like a small mistake can create like huge strategic impacts. So this is definitely an issue.

• 49:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  But presumably, okay, so I don't remember hearing in 2015 that we jammed ourselves in something absolutely catastrophic happened. So presumably, these are mostly minor things that we do that have happened.

• 49:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. A small delay, we can't hear from the satellite. We lost the connection to the satellite. What's going on? Reboot the machine. Okay, now it's working. That kind of situation is what I'm imagining. But there are times in conflict zones when this has definitely happened. Like Libya in 2006 jammed a mobile satellite provider called Thiraya. And a long investigation concluded the jamming came from Libya. So they decided they were going to like jam this whole provider of mobile satellite communications.

• 50:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And is Thiraya a Libyan company? Were they like trying to, was it a company that the Libyan government didn't like? Or was it some other countries?

• 50:19Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not clear. It came from Libya and the government of Libya is one of the shareholders of this company. So it's not even really clear exactly what the motivation was.

• 50:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Huh. All right.

• 50:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And then in Iran in 2002, there's another case of jamming. And of course, in conflict zones right now, like Russia has been accused of jamming GPS signals to interfere with the Ukraine military. And also Russia was accused of affecting flights over Eastern Europe by jamming GPS signals. There was a time when the European Commission president, her plane was forced to land because signals were jammed. She was like forced to land in Bulgaria.

• 50:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 50:59Daniel Whiteson?

  And they suspected interference by Russia.

• 51:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yikes. For a lot of these things, I wonder how hard it is to figure out who did the jamming. Because if you like, remove the, if you turn off the jammer and you remove the device.

• 51:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's probably hard to know, like, did a country jam our stuff? Or did we self jam? And to be clear, I'm not trying to be like, well, do we really know it's Russia? I'm not trying to exonerate Russia in this particular instance or anything. I'm just saying, this kind of stuff is hard, which I wonder, could make it used in war situations more often, just because it's the kind of thing that you can like, you know, say, oh, we didn't do it. Prove it. Prove it if you think we did.

• 51:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, because these signals can go really far distances. It's hard to tell exactly where they're coming from. And then even if you figure out where they were coming from, the jammer is not necessarily there anymore.

• 51:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, yeah, it's pretty effective and pretty easy to hide. But there are other things you can do to defend yourself. You can increase the power of your signal, just be louder than the noise. You can use a directional antenna, like we mentioned earlier, or you can change frequencies. Like, instead of just broadcasting on one frequency, you can have a plan with the person listening to your signal of how you're going to change frequencies. Like, we can agree on a schedule and we'll switch, we'll hop between frequencies. That makes it harder to jam.

• 52:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does mean, I mean, with satellites, you have to apply for frequencies through the International Telecommunications Union. So I wonder if that makes it hard to have secrets for like, which frequencies you're going to bounce between, because you need to register for the frequencies you're going to be using?

• 52:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, but usually you register for a range. And so if you move within that range in a specific pattern, then it can work. And in fact, this was an invention of Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr. She co-invented frequency hopping technology back in 1942 to help prevent the Nazis from jamming radio-guided torpedoes. Yeah, very cool. She's a Hollywood actress and a radio frequency genius. And that technology is used like now in modern Wi-Fi and GPS and all sorts of stuff.

• 53:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's awesome.

• 53:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Cool.

• 53:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Way to go.

• 53:05Daniel Whiteson?

  And advanced drones also do this to avoid being jammed. I mean, if somebody's controlling a drone, they're doing it using signals. And if you can jam those signals, they can Lose control of their drone, right? So the higher end drones have this sort of technology where the controller and the drone agree on the frequency schedule essentially to avoid being jammed or to be less susceptible.

• 53:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Interesting.

• 53:26Daniel Whiteson?

  But really, the best defense against being jammed is to find the jammer and turn off the jammer, you know, in some way. That's really the best thing you could do.

• 53:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you say turn off the jammer, I guess when I think of the jammer, I think of the person who's doing the jamming. And I was like, well, Daniel, that sounds very intense. But yeah, but yes, I guess turn off the equipment. But all right. Well, I had fun jamming with you today, Daniel, and I learned a lot.

• 53:50Daniel Whiteson?

  So that is how signal jamming works. And I hope that understanding the physics of this technology gives you more insight into how everything around you is working, how they're all talking to each other, and how mostly it works seamlessly, even if we get frustrated at our dishwashers.

• 54:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And our electrofishing boats.

• 54:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And if my dishwasher is sentient and is tapped into the podcast network and is listening to this, I'm not apologizing.

• 54:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Message to my Bosch, you're doing a great job. I appreciate you. Thank you for your hard work.

• 54:24Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. And you all are doing a great job of expanding your minds in this extraordinary universe.

• 54:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks, everyone. Until next time.

• 54:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 54:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 54:50Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 55:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 55:06Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 55:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project

• 55:41Speaker 07

  Develop a trip itinerary with daily updates or create a prioritize schedule so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com. This is Colin Cowherd from the Colin Cowherd Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or a half-ton Tundra to a Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

• 56:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multisensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off, or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Fordwards Affiliates. All rights reserved. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.