Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dotnet00 618 days ago
Starlink is supposedly harder to jam than typical satellite comms due to its use of phased array communication. IIRC you need to either be flying overhead or putting out a ton more power in a ground based jammer to be effective.

And as the other user mentioned, no country at the moment has the kind of stockpile of ASAT weapons needed to wipe the constellation (plus, due to orbital dynamics, there's a limit to how quickly they can take out satellites).

Between trying to wipe the constellation and jamming it, it'd be far more cost effective to jam even accounting for the higher power requirements/lower jamming range.

There would also be other interesting options like capturing and using enough terminals to force the entire cell to be disabled. That has been one of the challenges SpaceX has had to deal with near the frontlines in Ukraine.

1 comments

You can build a Faraday cage with a hole in the roof and starlink will be mostly unjammable.
Starlink satellites are vulnerable to repeated uplink transmitting their preamble code (which is public and the same across any user terminal). The satellites are so tuned to that code you can jam them through their receive sidelobes.. taking out all beams on the satellite.
Won't you need n jammers = n satellites in view for this? I haven't seen anyone commit to investing in this.
A single omnidirectional transmitter on the ground can transmit this one preamble code in all directions and it jams all satellites in view. All Starlink satellites use the same uplink code and they can't change it because it's how new terminals enter the network.
You could use a phased array to target each of them rapidly