Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector.
Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
This assumes you're jamming very close to the dish. The trouble with jamming is you have to deal with the inverse square law so you really can't deny very much area. If they have a fleet of hundreds of high power modern directional jammers they could degrade this or other networks, but they're just not going to have that kind of sophistication.
Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?
In short, likely no(unless the satellites are really sensitive). Otherwise lasers would have negated the fear of ICBMs long ago.
Because the atmosphere absorbs a lot of energy of the laser beam and focusing the laser beam to such a distant target is not easy. So you cannot just use some high powered lasers, as it would be just a bright spot at most. It would be different, if the laser would be space based, but that is out of reach of Iran's capabilities. They might have anti satellite rockets, but using them against US property in space would create other problems for them.
I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
> The biography, due out on Tuesday, alleges Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea. He is reported to have said that Ukraine was “going too far” in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.
The amendment on the article:
> This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.
So maybe Starlink did turn it off or maybe it was just jammed in some way or maybe, well... anything really. All this says is the source retracts the claim and The Guardian doesn't clarify beyond that. Edit: if you click the hyperlink for the name it actually clarifies it as a full on mistake in where there would be coverage.
I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?
Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites!
It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space.
On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one.
On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
> On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets
Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible.
> On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS
GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know.
GPS is in geosynchronous orbit, insanely far from the Earth's surface.
You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon.
Yes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector.
Thanks for your comment, I know the ionosphere is used in Electronic Warfare but I didn't realize it was so limited in frequency.
Is there really is no way to reflect signals off the ionosphere out of phase so after reflecting they interfere into a higher frequency?
Just to add more details.
Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
This assumes you're jamming very close to the dish. The trouble with jamming is you have to deal with the inverse square law so you really can't deny very much area. If they have a fleet of hundreds of high power modern directional jammers they could degrade this or other networks, but they're just not going to have that kind of sophistication.
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Possible, yes, but the Iranian government almost certainly isn't capable of doing so, much less across the entire country.
Even Russians don't seem to be able to jam Starlink on the Ukrainian battlefields.
China, maybe.
Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?
In short, likely no(unless the satellites are really sensitive). Otherwise lasers would have negated the fear of ICBMs long ago.
Because the atmosphere absorbs a lot of energy of the laser beam and focusing the laser beam to such a distant target is not easy. So you cannot just use some high powered lasers, as it would be just a bright spot at most. It would be different, if the laser would be space based, but that is out of reach of Iran's capabilities. They might have anti satellite rockets, but using them against US property in space would create other problems for them.
Cheaper to launch a barrel of metal trash to the Starlink orbits. Or a few barrels. Iran has rockets for that.
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Multibeam too, right?
>targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam
And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites...
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What is the point of this comment?
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I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.
> Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming.
Musk proved quite good at blocking Ukrainian Starlink access too, supporting Russia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264
The Russians are themselves heavy users of starlink.
Can you provide a source for this claim?
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That link says the story was retracted.
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The original claim:
> The biography, due out on Tuesday, alleges Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea. He is reported to have said that Ukraine was “going too far” in threatening to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the Kremlin.
The amendment on the article:
> This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.
So maybe Starlink did turn it off or maybe it was just jammed in some way or maybe, well... anything really. All this says is the source retracts the claim and The Guardian doesn't clarify beyond that. Edit: if you click the hyperlink for the name it actually clarifies it as a full on mistake in where there would be coverage.
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But isn’t Iran under sanctions? Do sanctions not apply when you are the richest man in the world ?
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Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.
I've got to think it's easy to find starlink receivers--I know they use a directed beam but they must give off a bunch of lateral noise, right? Or does Starlink use the same frequency bands as other common equipment such that it would be difficult to distinguish starlink signals from others? If the government was motivated they could surely start finding these receivers, right?
Well the better your beam is directed, the less lateral noise there is.
A simple 3 element yagi has <1% of the power to the sides. It has more of the power straight behind it, but still 1% or so of the main lobe.
Is 1% still quite a lot louder than other things in the same band?
From what I read, the Russians were targeting Starlink terminals based on the built-in wifi access point not the Starlink frequencies.
I read the satellite has an omnidirectional antenna?
Destroy the satellites? I mean all that have to do is screw up the trajectory of some of the satellites to cause exponential collisions...
Iran does not have that capability. But that would also be an act of war.
No, it wouldn’t be an act of war, it would be “a military operation”.
Flinging spacejunk pollution into orbit is extremely simple if you have rockets.
Iran has lots of rockets.
Iran also has basically zero of their own satellites in orbit that they care about.
Spacejunk is a highly asymmetric tactic.
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Ah yes, Kessler's space shredder, something to be feared by all satellites!
It appears that we are very close to an unstoppable runaway process of collisions in space. On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets after ruining this one. On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS, it would be chaos if that were to disappear...
Starlinks are in self cleaning orbits & are actually being moved even lower due to solar minimum & better capacity:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/spacex-lo...
And any weaponized junk schrapnel a DiY iranian ASAP missile would deploy would be sub-orbital and would all come down in a couple minutes.
> On one hand, nice that we prevent rich guys from running away to other planets
Kessler syndrome has little to no effect on trajectories only briefly transiting any given orbital shell. The collision probability of anything going straight "up"/"out" is negligible.
> On the other hand, a lot of services require GPS
GPS is in MEO, Starlink is in LEO. There's absolutely no chance any material will be propelled up to MEO via a series of even very unlucky LEO collisions, as far as I know.
GPS is in geosynchronous orbit, insanely far from the Earth's surface.
You can't get chain-reaction collisions to happen at such an outrageously high orbit. That amount of mass you'd have to put into orbit is just insane. It's like trying to crash the moon.
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