Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jandrese 1272 days ago
What is the EIRP of a starlink spot beam? Even if you had multiple satellites blasting a single region with all of their antennas does this do anything worse than raising the noise floor? It just seems like the orders of magnitude are all off for a weapon.

Maybe it gets powerful enough to burn out the radios in smartphones? I can't find a good reference to the total TX power from a Starlink satellite, but I do know that the spot beams have a 15 mile diameter and the inverse square law is a harsh mistress.
1 comments
jareklupinski 1272 days ago
If you have some way of measuring the received power from each satellite inside the cell phone, you might be able to use that as feedback to the array to better focus the signal/s?

You wouldn't need to disable the radio altogether, just swamping / destroying the antenna would be enough to 'disable' the system, for all intents and purposes. Since an antenna is optimized for a known frequency, resonance would probably also help.

It sounds just "James Bond villain-y" enough to not work.

link