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RF Safe-Stop Shuts Down Car Engines With Radio Pulse
An anonymous reader writes with news of a device built by a company in the U.K. which uses pulses of electromagnetic energy to disrupt the electronic systems of modern cars, causing them to shut down and cut the engine. Here's a description of how it works:
"At one end of a disused runway, E2V assembled a varied collection of second-hand cars and motorbikes in order to test the prototype against a range of vehicles. In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h). As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt. Digital audio and video recording devices in the vehicle were also affected.''It's a small radar transmitter,' said Andy Wood, product manager for the machine. 'The RF [radio frequency] is pulsed from the unit just as it would be in radar, it couples into the wiring in the car and that disrupts and confuses the electronics in the car causing the engine to stall.'"
Wasn't there a short story a few years ago where everyone had one of these and it ground the world to a halt because everyone was blasting each other?
those high-powered NSA satellites can do this from orbit. No, this is NOT meant to be a troll post. I wonder if a country could actually orbit a satellite with enough power and a spot beam to stop cars in an entire city... in the name of anti-terrorism, of course.
Toil is Stupid. Don't be Stupid.
What could possibly go wrong!
Wonder what people with pace makers would think about this thing when it stops their pace maker. Oh sorry, we didn't intend to kill you for a small traffic violation.
Can this be roof mounted toward the back of my car? Cya huge SUV following me from 5ft with xeon headlight!
This kind of thing would be ripe for abuse, but how many times have we heard/read about police chases which result in massive collateral damage and people getting killed?
I'm torn, but this seems like a really good thing for police to have. Especially if it can be directed so that it only affects the target.
So there are some potentially cool applications of this - stopping a criminal in a car chase with police, for example - but it has massive potential for crime as well. Stopping cars at night, in secluded areas, to steal them and/or assault the passengers? Or causing mayhem by stopping cars on freeways, not all of which will slow at the same speed, leading to massive pile-ups.
William George
Pacemakers and implanted defibrilators monitor the function of the heart by detecting voltage gradients of milivolts. This weapon can reliably knock out electronics in a car - electronics designed to operate in a very harsh EMI environment due to the presence of the nearby igntion system and contained within the metal body of the car. An enclosure that provides a bit more protection than 5mm of glass and 70cm of flesh.
So when they say this device poses no risk to those with a pacemaker, consider me a bit skeptical of that claim.
In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h). As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt.
Let's try this demonstration again in a situation where you would actually need such a device, i.e. in a high-speed pursuit. A 15 mph demonstration means nothing for the safety of the product.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The firm added that it did not believe the RF Safe-Stop posed any risk to people using a pacemaker.
They also added that old people with pacemakers are hilarious.
It won't work on a diesel with a mechanical injector pump. It may also clobber a cruise control system causing out of control acceleration.
This thing is a danger and would be illegal in the USA under FCC rules.
First thought: When shielding is criminal, only criminals will have shielding.
Second thought: This would be a really cool way to deactivate police cars that might be chasing you.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I thought this car EMP tech wasn't going anywhere when I started switching one of my cars to EFI late last year. Now this shit happens :-(
How can I shield my car against this? I'm willing to add up to 20lbs to do it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Why is it that people name their product the very opposite of what it is? Is it supposed to serve as some sort of rebuttal? Safe for who? The guy going 60mph? Anyone around him when he loses power steering and brakes?
A car EMP cannon has been one of those things that tech workers have talked about for years. You could use it to screw up data centers as well...or maybe the bank's power substation. How about a pacemaker?
Digital audio and video recording devices in the vehicle were also affected.
So, they can shut off your camera before they beat you half to death?
Don't trust any concentration of power.
That it successfully disabled a few old dilapidated junk is no big deal. Those vehicles are just a skip, hop and a jump from junkyard and would fail more easily. A modern car well insulated against electromagnetic interference is likely to protect some systems and lose some other systems partially. This is just dangerous.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
An EM pulse powerful enough to disrupt the recording equipment also disrupted the car's internal systems? Color me shocked; shocked and awed.
Will be fun to see how easy it is to use a drone to shut down these "taxis for the rich".
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See recent celebrity crash for what happens when you loose steering control at speed. Given the size of US cars and the prevelance of power steering and traction control there is no way this is going to be a safe way to stop a car.
A 1960s Range Rover will stop on it's own soon enough.
George Lucas (Verb) Lucasing, Lucased (a) The act of committing graphics overkill.
Better update it. Lucas Electrical
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Does this destroy the electronics ie make them no longer work until replaced?
Does this affect other things like watches, phones, pace makers and other medical equipment?
Would be an interesting oops... wrong vehicle or a innocent vehicle is in range when this is triggered.
You can find articles going back to 2004 with a similer idea. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/jul/12/sciencenews.crime
How much does it cost a victim of this device, having been acosted with no due process under the law, to restore the functionability to his or her electronics. I would be driving as fast as I could with another vehicle to the nearest courthouse to file suit.
No more taxes on cars and gasoline, no more restrictions, no more surveillance, no more control that isn't mine. It's my fucking car. Cars used to represent freedom, in some part.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
There appears to be nothing at all new about this 'news'.
Well, number 2 shouldn't be an issue; if the engine losing power causes a wreck the driver was unsafe already. As for 3, no, brakes and steering are not, AFAIK, pure drive by wire although I'd be open to a citation otherwise. Given those, 4 is irrelevant; if an engine outage causes a person to wreck they shouldn't have been driving, and 5 is interesting and a little scary.
It's NEVER safe to take control of a car away from a driver. I'm sure there are cases, where it can be used in place of spike strips, but let's not forget that the stearing wheel will automatically lock, if power goes out, and it happens even when the car is moving.
Let's also not forget that some people have pace makers, including other occupants in cars, and it can cost them their lives.
Let's also not forget that tazers were originally only going to be used in situations where a firearm would normally be used, but today, the tazer is the first response, and often unjustified, and it's only a matter of time until they use this type of device as a first response. Mark my words.
My vehicle (currently being heavily modified) will be immune from such a device, and it will reflect the attack, back on the attacker. They play their games, we play ours.
I wonder what it would do to a helicopter.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Dick Cheney's pacemaker probably has active defenses against such devices.
rewriting history since 2109
So ... how well will it work on airplanes?
I find it creepy that law enforcement has a means to disable just about every system society needs in order to communicate, defend itself, or gtfo.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
So the RF interference takes out the CAN bus, which runs communications between the various control units in the vehicle. This is a common problem in electrical vehicles, where the high power/current lines must be routed separately from the CAN bus wires.
There are two problems with this solution
1. Older vehicles are unaffected
Old cars, especially those with carburetors, are unaffected since they don't have any data buses that can pickup the interference.
2. The CAN bus carries safety critical information.
Corrupted data packets, such as by-wire throttle position information, can cause brake failures and/or uncontrolled acceleration when the ECU/TCU bombs out due to noise on the bus. Airbags may also deploy, although that is a bit more far-fetched.
A much simpler approach would be to sniff their smartphones, so you could send the driver a text that says "STOP UR CAR, LOL"
In my experience, the average driver will obey their smartphone screen more readily than local traffic laws.
My link got Lucased: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~mtmorris/index3.htm
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Exactly. Why bother chasing when it's easier to trace them (a limpet GPS tracker works fine) and set up roadblocks?
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So, if these pulses scramble the code, who is legally responsible for an automobile accident 2 weeks later if the gas pedal sticks (ala Toyota)?
As an engineer, I've spent a lot of time chasing the noise gremlins out of systems. For a time, I've worked on high power pulse lasers (+1J/pulse, sounded like gunfire every time it pulsed) ..It was a challenge to keep the noise down in the ADC's, protecting the FPGA/microcontrollers, etc, but it was manageable with good ground plane design, proper shielding, zener diodes, inductor chokes, pi filters, twisted-pair lines, hard-line coax, EMI filters on AC power inputs , etc. We also tried hard for it not to be a strong EMI emitter; something that was a challenge for us. .I wonder what kind of measures they take in cars, and are there low-hanging fruit? I am unfamiliar with protecting electronics from an EMP pulse, but am curious about how other engineers would model and protect against this. Faraday shields don't offer 100% attenuation, induced voltage gradients, etc.
How do you get that limpet tracker attached to the vehicle?
Just get in a high-speed police chase and get awesome chemotherapy treatment. Imagine being able to stop idiot drivers or slow ones that drive under the speed limit? Teenagers? No problem. Microwave them. They're young bodies will be back to normal in no time.
It is difficult for me to believe that the amount of energy required to be beamed to the vehicle in order to disrupt its electronics is still below a safe level for the human riding the vehicle, or anyone else in the beam width of the antenna.
If people are concerned about excessive exposure from cell phones, this should be off the charts.
It would have been interested to read about them trying to rewire these things until they worked; simple measures like twisting conductor pairs, etc.
They start as stops for minor offenses, but the reason most people run isn't for minor offenses. There's a subtle difference. The cop sees a person run a stop sign, they go to stop them. Is the person fleeing cause they ran a stop sign? No, the person is fleeing because they have warrants, or drugs in the car, or guns, etc. The cop doesn't know this though, they're not psychic. So, to the public, "Why did you chase him? All he did was run a stop sign!" If it comes to the attention of the bad guys that when they run and drive recklessly, that the police will stop chasing them, this will make bad guys run MORE thus endangering MORE lives in the long run. There are consequences for everything. Very few people run just because of a traffic offense, there's usually a lot more behind them running. Stopping pursuits teaches the bad guys to run more often. BAD MOVE.
Basically, this device is causing the car's computer(s) to crash. So, during low speed tests, in a wide open area, the car slowly glides to a stop??? I wonder what might happen if this were applied on a narrow highway, with lots of other vehicles on the road, at highway speeds? And what will happens when this device is used by the disgruntled (postal) worker, or some teens (not picking on teens, I used to be one myself) out for a mischievous time?
What if occasionally the computer's crash in a less expected way -- say for a moment the computer thinks you're trying to "park" (using your computer controlled parking assistant) while traveling at 60 miles per hour?
There are so many things wrong with this that it boggles the mind.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
there are launch devices. you can find them in any LEO product catalog.
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"It said it believed the primary use would be as a non-lethal weapon for the military to defend sensitive locations from vehicles refusing to stop."
so why would a person refusing to stop in a sensitive area deploy the brakes? they would be more likely to just let the car coast and hit what ever is right in the way, and with standard cars you can decouple the motor and the drive line manually leaving nothing to actually apply the brakes..
oh and
"The firm added that it did not believe the RF Safe-Stop posed any risk to people using a pacemaker."
its nice to know that they believe its safe.. ooh lawyers field day coming up! don't you think you would investigate that before making a prototype?
"its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt" This could have been Joeph Lucas, the Prince of Darkness or a rain drop! I never understood why the Misty Isles couldn't make a car that would keep running in the mist!
Klaatu barada nictou.
I drive an old Mercedes, with mechanical fuel injection and well...mechanical everything.
The active safety is good, (I've upgraded the brakes and suspension) and Merc were among the first to design-in crumple zones, so passive not too bad.
OK, I've no airbags...
Not being a nutty survivalist, just like having a car where I can fix everything myself, and no fucker with an EMP device, or anything else for that matter, is going to stop me.
Cost over the years (including fuel?), less than replacing it regularly with something "better".
This is intended to be used by law enforcement so:
1. He was a criminal. The police acted within policy guidelines. Case thrown out.*
2. He was a criminal. The police acted within policy guidelines. Case thrown out.*
3. He was a criminal. The police acted within policy guidelines. Case thrown out.*
4. Driving is a privilege, not a right. Part of that privilege is responsibility to avoid accidents. The police acted within policy guidelines. Case thrown out.*
5. We passed a law that makes this technology illegal outside of government use. Problem solved.
I wish I was joking.
*as long as there isn't a media uproar about a blonde, white woman being killed.
I'm really worried about electric and drive by wire car if this get sold on the market !
all that would need to happen is for the pacemaker to be in a faraday cage (metalized shell??) and it have a waveguide on the EXACT wavelength needed to "talk" with it (for settings stuff).
besides this would not be practical to have enough range to "pop" a number of cars at once (or a single car WAYYYY down the road).
as far as a GoldenEye type deal the inverse square law says "Howdy here is your reality check (and sign)"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If nothing else, they will be distracted for a few seconds while they read the text and you can do the PIT move on them... Your plan has merit..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Although fictional, this is not a new idea. KITT from Knight Rider could do this back in 1982 with its Micro Jam system: http://knight-rider.wikia.com/wiki/Micro_Jam
Nevermore.
Okay. I'm a copper in hot pursuit of bank robbers. I aim the magnetron from the police station's microwave oven at the car and miss, cooking the electronics in the cameras, cars, watches of people we're driving past, as well as the inventory in the shops on the street.
And someone with a pacemaker just dropped dead.
I'd imagine there'd be some hefty insurance claims.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Any proof of these claims you are making? Why has no one tried this before if all it takes is a generator from Harbor Freight?
Ooops.
sounds like you're essentially put in a microwave that uses a wider range of spectrum..... not only does your car stop (and likely have electrical problems forever), but you muscles come out medium rare.
The throttle in my car is "drive by wire". So why is it safe to assume that the overloaded ECU won't output "full throttle" instead of some supposed 'safe' state?
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
It's a pinch!
For a motorcycle, the instrument cluster isn't really in your face, one of the nice things about the experience. No competent rider should have even the slightest issue with an engine shutdown in a motorcycle. That's just that. The most that would happen is in some very high performance models the variable steering damper might misbehave, but if you're riding in a way that you need that, you're already well outside the realm of legal operations. For the car, the steering will possibly get stiff and brakes less responsive, and as you say, there will be possibly some distractions. As long as it's less dangerous in sum than a protracted high speed chase, it's still a win.
No, sorry, this is complete nonsense.
However might I suggest that most drivers will read their smartphone texts, almost without regard to their need to pay attention to the road. Therefore the thing to do is to send them a text, something designed to grab and hold their attention. Something like, "hey, check out this link for Lindsay Lohan's naked selfie!".
In the ensuing moments law enforcement will have a reasonable chance of merely cleaning up a traffic accident. A tree or light standard, that's a relatively small price to get a dangerous driver off the road.
Take the magnetron out of an old microwave and attach it to the rear bumper with a switch. In case the police are chasing me I turn it on to disable their car before they can pull in from of me to disable mine.
You see, being the bad guy, I'm going to be in the pole position in this particular car race.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
References? I can't seem to find any.
You'd have to faraday your entire car for this to work. Your entire wiring loom is one big antenna for this sort of signal. At the wavelength of radar, you'd be having a hard time keeping it all out too. Even tiny gaps to let the streering and drive shafts through, signal would probably creep in.
Making the electronic circuit boards themselves filter all their I/O and power lines for HF and over-voltage would be much easier to accomplish and probably more effective.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's quite interesting to see this posting on the heels of Jeff Bezo's fantastic claims to be only years away from drones that will deliver his zero-profits goods in 1/2 hour. Get your hands on one of these little zappers and you can go shopping from the end of your driveway.
Let em try it with my 1982 diesel Suburban.
It should survive the EMP and radiation from a nearby nuke without even stalling let alone some HERF gun wannabe.
I'd probably not survive that though it might take a couple weeks to die.
The irony of this story, is if it was some kid in his garage trying this out he'd he labled a terrorist.
If an established companies does it with the intentions of selling it to the authorities, who will, almost definately misuse it, its innovation
In other news, rain is wet.
C'Mon this made it as a story?
Who doesn't know this? An entire bond movie was focused around this exact idea.
I can't help that you're not supposed to be able to browse things only government LEO forces are supposed to browse.
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This has been done before. I think at one time law enforcement were looking at launching rocket propelled trams from under a police cruiser, when deployed large metal prongs would pop up, when it rolled under a car in front of it, ideally the car the police were pursuing the engine would be fried and bring the car to a stop.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Running fiber optice cables right up to the engine seems unlikely to me, nevermind fitting said electronics onto every engine-mounted device that could currently be interfered with by this system.
I'd like to also see this tried on a much more primitive engine... one that didn't make use of transistors.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Remember when you could key your CB radio and watch those newfangled electronic injection cars down-throttle? I do. It was funny. This RF Pulse technology has no effect on cars with carburetors.
Found one.
They are also not without flaws;
So back to StarChase, this "revolutionary" GPS launching system: It has some flaws. The cannon costs $5,000 and the non-reusable GPS "bullets" cost $500 each. During a recent media demonstration, four sticky bullets were fired at a car, but only one of them stayed stuck.
That was under good conditions. It is a good idea but not very practical.
Old School Technology Rulz while you all with your new fangled infotainment system and ABS and TPS senors and electronic fuel injection will all be hitchhiking, I will be cruising along in my Jerry Garcia special...
Burning/Leaking oil
Gas Tank right behind the engine waiting to explode.
No Seat Belts
And you all think the Carerra GT is dangerous...
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That was under good conditions. It is a good idea but not very practical.
Didn't say they weren't without flaws. The best GPS tags are placed, not shot. Shooting them is not needed when it's a recent model car - those have tracking in them already. Also license plate trackers and other ident software on most major urban arterials and most freeways.
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They have tested many devices like this over the past decade here in the US. None are currently being used because they have a bad habit of disrupting pacemakers, and insulin pumps, even if the driver of the fleeing car does not have either of these they still would have to be worried about bystanders. In order for this to be morally right to use it would have to be highly precise in aiming and with the various place the ECU in cars can be located would really be ineffective. The only place that I could see this being used is in a high speed chase with the remote highway which has been closed off, and at those speeds the disabled car might cost beyond the range of the device and then be able to restart, and in those situations someone could make an argument of just using an anti-material rifle.
So total bullshit. Got it. Cites or go home.
Shooting them is not needed when it's a recent model car - those have tracking in them already.
That generally require a warrant and time to get access to that information and there are many cars without trackers in them or with their trackers disabled.
Also license plate trackers and other ident software on most major urban arterials and most freeways.
Another slow source of data that is near useless in real time tracking.
Someone has been watching too many TV shows. Real life is not that easy.
Or a nearby lamp post will stop them.
So total bullshit. Got it. Cites or go home.
See one of the other responses which did have access to such catalogs.
Get a job.
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Depends on the state or "district" and the legal structure.
In Washington State, yes, but you can't track GPS or other info without a warrant anyway, so if you don't have one, you're not going to do this.
If a terrorist or near a border there are other exceptions, and a lot of the "dark" networks they say are turned off get turned on when needed.
You must live in a crowded part of the country - here there are only so many exits people can take - fairly easy to not chase people without risk.
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a lot of the "dark" networks they say are turned off get turned on when needed.
Which takes time and probably won't be done for a traffic stop.
You must live in a crowded part of the country
A lot of people live in crowded areas; that is why they are crowded. It also assumes that most high speed chases occur on major urban arterials and freeways which is not true at all.
Ha ha, they won't be able to stop my '82 Plymouth Reliant. Well, at least not once I get it started again.
I knew there was a good reason I kept it up on blocks out behind the garage. All those years my wife gave me grief about it and the family of squirrels living in it, but now who's smart? Hm?
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you have one of these and you're the criminal, you dump the police car pursuing you in a mass of 40 stalled vehicles.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
So how long before some dumb pig cop kills someone with a pacemaker using this
Nothing but neckbeards spewing jargon out of their ass. Feeding a microwave transformer into a satellite dish does nothing. "Technically possible" means you think it is but have no engineering background to explain any theory or concepts.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Have a police car with a Taser type of device, except it's a bit heavier duty - enought to stick into the cars metal skin.
Once it sticks - it fires a big electric shock, frying the cars electronics, and shuts the whole works down.
Yes
The Carpoon
..........FULL STOP.
What frequency and power is this? Standing in front of a real radar transmitter is basically like cramming yourself into a microwave oven and hitting the power switch. Not so healthy. And he's basically saying that "It's a small radar transmitter"
Why, yes! I AM new here.
Governments have been asking for kill switches in private cars for 20 years now. The problem is two-fold: 1) being able to identify a specific car, 2) preventing the removal or malevolent activation of the kill switch.
Yeah this is like that James Bond movie: A magnetized watch that can stop bullets. Leaving aside the fact there's no iron in a bullet; at speed, the target will be in the electro-magnetic field of the attacker for milli-seconds. Which won't be enough time to cause electrical damage.
Apart from engine control, which electronics will be harmed with such a device? Anything that can make electronic devices behave erratically can also damatge those devices permanently.
Will it "stop dead" people wearing pacemakers? Maybe even not just the persons in the car, but bystanders, too?
If the police by chance kills some bankrobbers car just in front of my house, will It kill my home electronics, too? Maybe even permanently damage devices (Storage!)?
AFAIK the good old toyota land cruiser pickup is the vehicle of choice in some countries for paramillitary units (Look at all the land cruisers with MGs in the middle east). Is this kind of car ancient enough to evade this chip killer system?
Lets see what happens if the bad guys get their hands on such a thing, and start stopping cars to rob the owners. Or prison busses. Or police cars chasing them. Or armored cars with valuables. Or just stop cars to produce chaos - just swwep this thing across the key roads during morning rush hour in a few places, and the police will be tied up, without any chance to react to a theft/bank robbery...
All in all, more qustions than answers...
This is dangerous as hell.
There are drive by wire steering systems as well as brakes that this will affect. You can't guarantee that it wont cause a sudden application of left/right steering or sudden braking by the ABS ECU.
You also have steering assist systems that can be ECU controlled as well.
I rather this tech never sees real-world use.
well duh! it was only going 15 mph. Try it in a vaguely realistic use case and see what happens.
Exactly, Civillians have no choice, we are cattle.
We have the freedom to OBEY.
We must obey all their laws and dictates.
They say we can't have little girl wives, so we can't.
Can't have good weapons, so we can't.
I hate this cuntry and all like it (china etc).
The poster you responded to is probably working for the goverment with his (or her) "we" bullshit.
I wish "we" could and would overthrow the government and destroy it completely down to the last marble brick in the capitol. This is a police state, and a feminist one at that. Worthless.
Those early 1970s german Mercedes cars with naturally aspirated, mechanically injected, heat filament-ignited diesel engines are probably immune to such EMP attempts. Furthermore, they will circle the globe 20x, loaded with luggage to the brim, without any need for repairs or refurbishment. Surely, they are not lighting fast, nor have rocket-like acceleration, but extremely reliable, built to last and consume relatively little fuel. In many parts of the world, they are still being used to carry vegetables to the market every day, etc.
Switch off the engine, dump the clutch, coast out of range, bump start.
Am I on a watch list now?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
My first thought was not of high speed pursuit, but of automatically stopping trucks before they destroy tunnels.
This should make it much easier for car jackers, robbers at traffic lights, etc to attack their victoms.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
Surely if you were at a runway you would have tested it on an airplane???
A few days ago I found a hand-held tesla coil in my junk box (I used to use it for finding tiny leaks in glass, uh, "things"). I brought it upstairs to show my son, turmed it on and showed him a 2 inch arc from the "nose" over to an outlet cover. My wife's brand new LED floor lamp was plugged in, and it went right out. There were some anxious seconds before it turned on again and worked normally.
Semiconductors are getting smaller and faster all the time, and there's a lot of MOSFETs used where in the olden days there were big bipolars with large junction capacitance. Stuff is UL tested for emissions, but not susceptibility. Cars, though, do have RF susceptibility standards.
I'm sure these could be used to attack drones or zoom in on a specific car if mounted on a drone or even more scarily to take down an airplane. Too scary for my taste.
This system seems much more advanced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56veH8-KbEM
Will this affect my 68 rotted out Cutlass?