Developing a Low Cost, Portable Jammer Detection and Localization Device for First Responders

A low cost, portable, robust jammer detection, and localization device is proposed and developed in this work. Intentional or unintentional use of jammers is detrimental to the seamless operation of emergency rescue and public safety missions as it disrupts the critical communication devices. The proposed device employs robust parallel detection algorithms based on Kurtosis and FRactional Fourier Transform (FRFT) to detect the most common types of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) that affects critical communication signals. As part of preliminary performance analysis, the proposed detection technique is compared to the conventional energy detectors (employed in many commercial interference detectors) and shown to achieve significant improvement (similar to 40 dB) in probability of detection. The developed device is envisioned to revolutionize the low cost, portable spectrum interference monitoring sector.