Comment by malchow
13 hours ago
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
13 hours ago
Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.
Starlink uses beamforming with directional antenna arrays, so it should be rather difficult to jam compared to omnidirectional antennas. It's basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Antenna arrays aren't perfect so it still picks up some energy omnidirectionally, but it should be possible to shield it with some metal plates in a way that only sky is visible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.
Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.
A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.
People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam? Combined with some sort of frequency hopping and a moving constellation should mean blocking a user or satellite signal should be pretty hard, like many times the cost of building and servicing a user terminal for use against protesters.
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I think, to beamform in the right direction you have to be able to locate yourself precisely, have an up-to-date almanach of the satellites, and a precise enough datation source. Jamming GNSS is a source of problems for 2 of those issues.
Also, the antennas on starlink dishes are still pretty small, likely to pick up some hard-to-remove sidelobes and the tech to cancel them properly might be export-controlled. You still need to be within electromagnetic visibility to jam them, though.
Yes, afaik the source of issues is GPS jamming.
To add to my point, with multiple antennas it's also possible to spatially separate signals. Not sure if Starlink is doing that, but I think it should be possible to escape GPS jammers by using two antennas with some distance between them. Two antennas can pick up the direction of the signals and with some math they can be separated, at least in theory.
But it's in extremely difficult to disrupt the signals across the whole country? I person go go out with a battery and setup a starlink terminal in the middle of nowhere in 2 minutes (exactly how I'm writing this post right now from Boliva)
If your objective is to stop or at least slow coordination of protests and flow of information about things the regime is doing in the major cities of Tehran and Mashhad, you're a lot less worried that plenty of rural villages get completely unhindered signals, if anyone in them happens to have a Starlink terminal.
Agreed, the only way to get starlink terminal is via smuggling it into the country and it costs 1000's of $ or 500$ or more which is more than many months of average iranian income let alone rural villages
I hope though that perhaps rural villages can shelter activists but who knows what happens in the ground level, perhaps news development from tehran doesn't reach the villages in the first case, maybe they block anyone entering and leaving the city I am not sure
This seems to be a really bad development for protestors. There were reports that some protestors were killed by the govt and now I am genuinely worried about them even more. This tyranny needs to be stopped.
Some videos are still leaking out and it’s likely via starlink (from what I’ve read). Better than nothing.
10W is enough to block GPS signals in a 15-30km radius. The signals are below the noise floor and easy to disrupt.
Russia seems to have been ineffective at stopping the Ukranians using it.
There are multiple photos of Russian drones using Starlink terminals, so they would be blocking their own use of it.