It's RL mirroring SR part 694513874, but I nevertheless found it interesting considering runners often have to deal with tracking RFIDs in that shiny pice of gear you...found: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/gps-un...nic-war-n618761

(Yes, it's a bit alarmist. But nothing more than what's usual for a general news outlet writing on tech topics )

AmeriCarRun

Well I suppose it's a good thing that the jammers in SR are so shit then. Rating 10 area jammer has a maximum range of 50 meters and a directional jammer is 200 meters. Real life the things are (according to the article) 980 meters to several kilometers.

edit: Nm.

Communication technology could have improved a bit you know? Faster than jammers anyway.
Taking examples from the real world has no real meaning when you talk about the game.

Not "real life", more "assuming conditions in which B/G Wifi would cover 100 m, and N would double that range"

Based on the distances jammers work, whoever came up with them may have been thinking of indoor uses. Walls and corners and repeaters tend to affect signal and whatever fluff the jammers in SR run on.

Given that a Seattle city block is on average around 110m, from a gaming standpoint they probably set a more reasonable lower limit so you don't have someone who can effectively mess with the wifi bonuses of everything in just under a 9 city block radius with just one jammer.

I guess we should be seeing more gangers running around with jammers anyway, even if it's just cheap homemade models they had someone cobble together, just to give themselves an edge in operating.

Pocket decker to keep the alarms quiet while you're operating, for relatively cheap? I can see that being widespread in less-than-legal circles.

Well since the fall off is -1 rating point for every 5 meters, the area jammers are effectively useless unless you are practically standing on the thing. Hitting someone with a -1 signal at 50 meters is pointless. They don't even do that in SR5. They penalize the deckers for a -1 per rating point to matrix tests and that's it. Unless the decker is standing on the thing he won't notice that penalty much. You can still (according to RAW) make a phone call while standing on a rating 10 area jammer since that isn't a matrix test. SR 5 removed most of whatever use jammers had but they weren't all that great in SR 4. Removing the fall off would make them somewhat better but you would still be able to localize the jammer pretty easily since it has a maximum range of 50 meters. So somewhere in a 1 block area. Triangulation will narrow that down since you aren't dealing with a very large (geographically) area.

Which in turn means the target needing a decker type with good ECCM skills to counter the jamming by using techniques like Polarization of the signal, Chirping or other fun means.