[Starlink] Starlink no longer available to the Ukrainian army?

[Steve Stroh]

On the battlefield, high power continuous jamming such as you describe
tends not to last very long. There are special missiles (HARM - High speed
AntiRadiation Missile) to remedy that situation. They home in on a jamming
transmitter like a beacon.

One of the stellar attributes about Starlink is that it’s using phased
array antennas on both user terminals and satellites, proving a “tight
beam”. I’m speculating, but my guess is that clever programming is
configuring the satellite beams to be contoured to ignore contested areas
where jamming is being attempted. An additional speculation is that
Starlink is programming both the satellites and user terminals to
continuously authenticate each other’s transmission, allowing them to
ignore spoofing attempts.

Not to mention that the directional nature of the beams allows for a
positional reality check. If a terminal is attempted to be used by the
enemy and the terminal’s internal GPS is spoofed to say it’s well within
Ukraine (good guy territory) rather than its real location outside Ukraine
(bad guy territory), the satellite can discern that a terminal really isn’t
where it’s reporting it is, and that terminal gets (permanently?)
deauthorized.

On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 13:45 Mike Puchol via Starlink <
starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Pumping out RF at fairly high power levels, and pointing an antenna at a
> satellite, are both things very easy to do for someone like Russia. To then
> jam 500 MHz of spectrum all at once is not that trivial, and one can get
> creative, eg by only attacking the reference subcarriers in OFDM, thus
> concentrating RF power on those, rather than the whole channel.
>
> There are some papers written around jamming LTE by attacking specific
> resources instead of the whole band, making the attack less conspicuous,
> something similar could be applied against Starlink. By not using brute
> force, you also make the attack harder to detect and counter.
>
> My view is that Russia is not worried about being noticed, and just
> applies brute force.
>
> Best,
>
> Mike
> On Oct 14, 2022 at 20:26 +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek <jch at irif.fr>, wrote:
>
> Juliusz, see the Twitter thread I linked to, it explains precisely the
> jamming scenarios they could be facing, and how they are possible.
>
>
> I saw it after I wrote my question, and it does explain a lot. Thanks.
>
> Do you have an idea how difficult it is to actually do in practice? Is it
> a simple matter of plugging a second-hand VSAT dish to an old amateur
> radio rig, or do you actually need to be a research lab of the Moscow
> Academy of Sciences to do it?
>
> -- Juliusz
>
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-- 
Steve Stroh N8GNJ (he / him / his)
Editor
Zero Retries Newsletter - https://zeroretries.substack.com
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