5G Electronic Warfare

Background

In conjunction with our player unit development, we have started investigating how we can bring electronic warfare capabilities into our future products.

We are currently prototyping with a Software Defined Radio (SDR) and a GNU radio to fast-prototype radio systems to create a proof-of-concept jamming system leveraging SDRs. Utilizing these two items, we have successfully jammed a commercial 5G smartphone to help us understand the possible situations in reference to electronic warfare.

Athena-Tek has created an open-source 4G private network that we utilize as the testbed for our electronic warfare testing and demonstrations. Our goal is to leverage the jamming and private network capability to create a full-scale electronic warfare testbed that can be used by the Army for Electronic Warfare Training for soldiers.

The US Army and Department of Defense are interested in the application of Electronic Warfare in a 5G environment. With the rollout of 5G networks globally, potential vulnerabilities and security concerns need to be addressed.

Athena-Tek leverages an open-source private network to test how ARES II operates in an Electronic Warfare environment. We are able to demonstrate our device being jammed by an SDR on our private network. Once jammed, ARES II collects the network KPI’s from the 5G modem which is used for analysis. This information is used to develop the next-generation ARES II for Army Testing, Training, and Tactical use cases.