[Starlink] spacex & ukraine

[Mike Puchol]

Thank you Dave, the honor is mine to share a mailing list with so many people who know way more than I do, about any subject I could point my finger at, so I really appreciate it.

On the subject at hand, ELINT/SIGINT and traffic analysis has evolved massively over the years. In the mid-90s, the Chechen president was killed by Russia with a missile strike, based on his satcom phone signals, which included decoding the speech and matching to ensure they were hitting the right target.

The balance, as David mentions, is on the value of the target vs. the effort required to strike. It is relatively easy to monitor cellular networks, decrypt the traffic, and triangulate to almost automatically target & strike. The same happens with VSAT, which operates against a fixed satellite, so an aircraft high enough will be in the path between a large portion of the ground and the satellite.

With Starlink, the challenge is two-fold. You must be able to detect & locate the 4.5º wide uplink beam from a terminal, which constantly moves - this can be done by measuring just the RF levels and using an ESA to find the source. You must also ensure that the user of the terminal is a target valuable enough to justify a strike, which would be a lot harder, as you need to keep a good enough SNR to demodulate, then you’d need to decrypt. Doing this in real time on an airborne platform is quite a challenge.

Bottom line: unless Russia goes all-out against anyone using any form of radio comms (phones, VSAT, satcom, Starlink, etc.) and they just blindly strike any source of RF, a Starlink user has a good chance to avoid being targeted by just using the terminal. Different case is if terminals get used by the military, and Russia then assumes Starlink = military target. We’re far from any clear scenario, so we need to wait & see.

A couple of weeks ago I sent a Ku band LNB to Oleg, tuned to the Starlink uplink band (12.75 - 14.5 GHz), but it arrived a couple of days before the invasion began, so he didn’t get a chance to do any analysis on the TX side of the terminal.

Best,

Mike
On Mar 1, 2022, 22:15 +0300, David Lang <david at lang.hm>, wrote:
> a couple thoughts on anti-radiation missiles being fired at starlink dishes
>
> 1. the dishes are fairly low power (100w or less) and rather directional, so
> they aren't great targets.
>
> 2. dishes cost FAR less than the missiles that would be fired at them, and are
> being produced at a much higher rate (although there are probably more missles
> in the Russian inventory than spare dishes in SpaceX inventory)
>
> direction finding teams with boots on the ground could be more of a threat, but
> the higher frequency signals are blocked fairly easily (which is why the dishes
> need a clear view of the sky). It takes a fair amount of training to be good at
> direction finding on weak and intermittent signals.
>
> David Lang
>
> On Tue, 1 Mar 2022, Dave Taht wrote:
>
> > Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2022 13:55:47 -0500
> > From: Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com>
> > To: starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> > Subject: [Starlink] spacex & ukraine
> >
> > It is an ongoing honor to have mike puchol sharing his insights with
> > us, also, on this list.
> >
> > https://spacenews.com/spacex-heeds-ukraines-starlink-sos/
> >
> > --
> > I tried to build a better future, a few times:
> > https://wayforward.archive.org/?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.icei.org
> >
> > Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
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