I know that if someone were to be interfering with critical radio communications (such as police and fire communications, air traffic control communication, etc.), the FCC (or another country’s equivalent) has equipment to trace down the source.
How does the equipment to find the location work? And also, how does it tell how many transmitters are currently broadcasting at that frequency?
In: Technology
Multiple [directional antenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_antenna) (usually 3) provide you with a direction in the way that your ears do for sound, the strength of the signal gives you a rough distance. Moving around with this setup provides you with more data, the more you move around the more data you have. The more data you have, the less places the signal could come from.
Imagine three [directional antenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_antenna) (A,B and C) which are set in a Y formation.
– Standing still 50 meters from the signal and turning until one antenna (say A) has the strongest signal it can have. The direction it faces is the direction of the signal.
– Move towards the signal, it should get stronger on all antenna but especially A.
– If you move past the signal, the signal for A will get weaker while stronger for B and C.
– Repeat until the distance is 0 and all antenna have equal signal, while moving in any direction makes the signal share unequal.
One way to interfere with this is to have signal repeaters meaning that there are multiple sources but the above method can still work. You just follow the strongest one till you get to either the source or a repeater, if it’s a repeater you take it offline then repeat till you find the source.
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