Comment by alephnerd
6 hours ago
Yes in most population centers. Any country that has the ability to stand up a cellular network has the ability to deploy jamming at scale.
The components needed to build jammers and EW systems have been heavily commodified for a decade now (hell, your phone's power brick, car, and TV all have dual use components for these kinds of applications), and most regional powers have been working on compound semiconductors and offensive electronic warfare for almost a generation now.
I don't think it's as easy as you're suggesting. GPS L1 jamming has been done routinely enough but the satellite bands (X/Ku/Ka) appear to be much more difficult to pull off.
Iran was reported to have mobile units with a fairly short range that constantly roamed around, only hitting 2 of the 3 bands (Ku/Ka). They're also reported to have received mobile Russian military units capable of jamming all 3 (X/Ku/Ka) over a much wider area. (I'm not actually clear the extent to which X band is associated with either Starlink or Starshield. Starshield also reportedly operates to at least some extent in parts of the S band. [0])
So the technology clearly exists but it doesn't seem to be something you can trivially throw together in your basement. That's quite unlike (for example) a cell phone jammer which a hobbyist can cheaply and easily assemble at home. I assume the extreme directional specificity of the antennas plays a large part in that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5575254/spacex-starshie...
Couldn't they target each starlink satellite for jamming as it flies overhead? The sat would still send fine, but you could effectively kill the antenna?
I guess (non-expert understanding) that it depends on how tight the beamforming is (relative to the distance of the jammer from a given ground station) or alternatively if the jammer can prevent the satellite from successfully locating the ground station to begin with.