1/2 idea No. 12: Landscape of jamming

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

It’s going to disappoint my STS colleagues, but this neither a proposal to study al fresco jazz nor the material culture of raspberry conserve

Nevertheless it would be a project about jamming. I hope you like jamming too.

The idea has roots in my PhD research on the history of radio astronomy, specifically Jodrell Bank, subsequently published in Science and Spectacle (1994). Understanding ‘interference’ was the key to that study, and there was a chapter on how attempts by astronomers to combat radio interference by seeking to control certain activities led to a distinct geography, zones of difference centred on the telescope. The pictures show the zones caused by denying radio frequency use to other parties, and zones caused by planning regulations.

 

These restrictions led to small, but discoverable, changes to land use. There was therefore a landscape of interference.

‘Landscape of jamming’ would develop this geographical study. Jamming is the deliberate causing of radio interference, usually, but not always, as a military countermeasure.

A very incomplete list of possible case studies of a study of the landscapes of jamming:

• Orfordness, where the American surveillance radar Cobra Mist was closed in the 1970s due to interference. The site for Cobra Mist was then used for BBC World Service radio, so there are civil and military aspects here
• Cyprus. An important Cold War base for UK electronic surveillance and countermeasures, with its own severe military geography
• The ‘carcinotron’, the cancer of radars, a device for powerful broad-band radio transmission, that it the 1950s and early 1960s was seen as a severe threat to air defences.

Where else?

What analytical concepts might help?