Even with a key you can drown out the signal by blasting enough RF waves at the receiver or area. I’ve heard a Growler pilot describe what they do as shining a spot light in your face to blind you.
Continuing that analogy, in the case where a sky facing directional antenna is being used: the pilot is crouched under a sewer grate, shining a light at the soles of your feet, as you stare up into the night sky. If you are pumping enough power to overcome a directional antenna, than you are more in the realm of a directed energy weapon - which requires an insane amount of power (see inverse-square law).
Yes but you would have to do that from top down. You can't shine a spot light on the back of a person's head to blind them. Not to mention the tricks they use to make RF signals directional to both send and receive.
> You can't shine a spot light on the back of a person's head to blind them.
You can, if the spot light is strong enough, and the person in question isn't floating in deep space. Just keep adding power until the light reflected by the person's surroundings is strong enough to blind them.
> Not to mention the tricks they use to make RF signals directional to both send and receive.
Makes me wonder if there's an RF equivalent of getting permanently blinded by laser light scattering off random objects in your line of sight.
that's called jamming and was addressed by the comment. if you wear very narrow blinders and point your face right at where you want to look, then the enemy needs to install their spotlight right ahead of you instead of just anywhere in front.
Incidentally, there has been a recent escalation in this: over Iraq commercial airline pilots have been reporting increasingly successful GPS spoofing, with GPS positions being shifted by tens or hundreds of nm, the clock being shifted, etc. In some cases this has exposed bugs in aircraft software where it has not successfully recovered the GPS position even after leaving the affected area, leaving them with degraded navigation all the way to the destination.
This is not as dire as it might sound, as there are plenty of other ways for an aircraft to determine its position, though it certainly reduces the margins for error in some cases. But it’s interesting because such spoofing should be extremely difficult to carry out successfully, especially on a moving target like an airliner.
