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

[Dave Taht]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2022 at 10:31 AM Steve Stroh via Starlink
<starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> 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.

You also don't have to locate them at the front. People seem to have
forgotten that it's just a networking technology. You could expend
even something as ancient as a nanostation M5 radio (which used to
have 50km of range), for a directional link to a starlink, or use
something in the 900mhz or even 430 mhz spectrum, which have better
terrain following properties.

You can hook up a nearly unlimited number of natted radios to a given
starlink terminal and also have 5g backup and a variety of other tech
to make it meshier and more reliable. In the openwrt world we have the
babel routing protocol
which among many other things, allows you to use up just /64 creatively.

These 60ghz radios, although lousy in rain, were pretty good too.

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/openwrt-on-the-ubnt-af60-xg-af60-hd/139511

>
> 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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Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC