[4khilles]

They already delivered Starlink and it's working in Ukraine. They're making improvements to mitigate jamming but to imply they didn't "deliver" is absurd. Regarding similar projects, there are more success stories (e.g. Tonga) than failures but they're ignored since they don't fit into a simple narrative.

[HWR_14]

Yes, they did in fact deliver the star links. I was talking about the anti-jamming/anti-detecting firmware. Given that various militaries have thrown billions upon billions on radar/comms jamming and detecting, it seems like it's probably a hard problem.

[janekm]

There's a lot that can be done to help in terms of preventing jamming and detecting, and it mostly involves a tradeoff with bandwidth/latency. The simple approach to evade jamming is to decrease the FEC (forward error correction) ratio (meaning using more bandwidth to send each bit, simply put) and increase retransmit backoff and any timeouts, to make detection harder you would send packets from the user's dish less frequently and with random delay (increasing upstream latency).

Both could be countered by a sophisticated adversary, but the Russian troops may be a little preoccupied at the moment, and their EW teams are probably going to focus on Bayraktar before Starlink...

Starlink have already enabled "Roaming" for Ukraine which involves similar tradeoffs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PDVURcvWeg (in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the changes enabled for roaming also improve jamming resilience)

[HWR_14]

I didn't mean to say I'm unimpressed with Starlink as a whole. It's a cool piece of technology. I just wanted to say that the issues they're facing are truly serious and have had huge resources thrown at them.

Meanwhile, I assume it's far easier to take out Starlink than Bayraktar. In no small part because interference was part of the threat model when Bayraktar's hardware and software were being designed. And they can get a lot of results for less effort with Starlink.