Oh, this is fascinating. Just a bit disappointing that the article doesn't mention at all why it's possible for random people in Brazil to access these satellites.
Right? Might as well open it up to the public. Brazilians hueing it up in their satellite is really the least of their problems. If a bunch of civilians can cobble together enough equipment to use the satellite, gotta wonder what nation states with real resources can manage.
So how insecure is this stuff, really? Radio security seems to be based on "authorities really, really don't want you to do this".
> Oh, this is fascinating. Just a bit disappointing that the article doesn't mention at all why it's possible for random people in Brazil to access these satellites.
From the article, to answer the hardware side of your question, which was mine as well.
> To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM's 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware.
The Fleetcom satellites are, if I recall, just “bent pipe” satellites. There receive on one frequency and retransmit on another with zero logic onboard. Analog, digital, whatever. If you wanted them to encrypt their broadcasts, you’d just encrypt the signal before transmitting on the ground and it would happily rebroadcast your encrypted signal back to earth.