A smart jamming system for UMTS/WCDMA cellular phone networks for search and rescue applications

Recent statistics show an increase in environmental disasters, a fact which is also perceivable to the public as reports of avalanches, earthquakes and landslides mount in media coverage. This paper introduces one part of the I-LOV project, endorsed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In this project partners from relief organizations, universities and industry investigate enhancements to disaster handling and victim rescue. One possible option is to take advantage of the fact, that a lot of people own a mobile phone today. To locate a person by his or her mobile phone requires to take over the phone by an own Base Transceiver Station (BTS). Jamming all other networks is one option to achieve that. This paper will introduce a new Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based jamming system which disturbs only the absolute necessary parts of the WCDMA spectrum but reliably cuts all connections between mobile stations (MS) and existing BTS. The whole system including the signal generator and the front end will be discussed. Also measurement results will be shown.