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by hartator 165 days ago
I candidly thought it wasn’t possible to block Starlink.

I guess with motivated actors anything is possible.

6 comments

The title is wrong, as usual. This is a re-hash of earlier reports. Starlink is getting 30-80% packet loss, depending on where they're using it. Likely local jammers. But it still gets through.
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.

It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.

The Russians have developed rather efficient GPS jamming equip., as we know, Iranian Gov't is partners with Russians, providing drone technology, so no great mystery where likely the jammers originated from.
There's a difference between possible and plausible. In the most absurd case, it was always a given that a sufficiently large faraday cage or a literal iron dome would block starlink from reaching anybody in iran therefore it was never thought to be impossible to block starlink. At best it's implausible but that would refer specifically to the construction of the giant faraday cage and the literal iron dome, not the concept of blocking starlink.
Jamming or hijacking geostationary satellites signal is trivial for literally a team of 3 hm radio veterans with 10+ years of experience.

Jamming RF is easy in general. Nowadays we can even do beamforming so i guess it would be trivial.

If it were impossible, China would've had reason to blow up their satellites in orbit. The US would do the same thing for Chinese satellite ISPs.

Jamming on such a large scale is expensive, but it's hardly impossible.

There’s no evidence that China (or anybody else) has the capacity to meaningfully harm the 9000+ satellite Starlink constellation.
Debris creating debris creating debris ... ?
Yes, I’ve seen this!

It was a small, triangular ship that blasted big asteroids, which in turn spun off and collided with other asteroids…

Only if they want to kill 99% of all sattelites since this is a game that can be played together.