[Starlink] "Interesting set of developments with Starlink. Musk says they will support "international aid orgs" in Gaza, Israel now says they will use "all available means" to stop SpaceX from doing so.

[Ulrich Speidel]

On 31/10/2023 2:30 am, Alexandre Petrescu via Starlink wrote:
>
>
> > How they would oppose is a good question - I'm sure the Russians would
> > like to know, too.
> >
> From the public announcements, Russia opposed it (starlink) verbally, 
> only.
>
> I dont think (I did not hear about?) Russia jamming starlink sats.
>
> Russia verbally  once threatened verbally harder the starlink sats, but
> Mr. Musk responded publicly that there are thousands of them up there,
> so it would be hard to imagine putting them all down.  He even said he
> could easily put even more up there.
>
> I did hear about Russia complaining about others jamming their sats.
> Russia persons called the jamming of their sats to be potentially cases
> of war, but they did not repeat that statement later, or I did not
> hear.  I am not sure what in the current legislation made them think so,
> but I would like to know.
>
> I also heard about the VIASAT KA-SAT attack early in the Ukraine
> invasion (it was an attack via Internet, not jamming).
VIASAT are geostationary satellites 36000 km above the Equator, and they 
don't move relative to ground stations like LEO sats (Starlink & Co) do. 
They're a much easier target, both in terms of RF jamming (the further 
you are away from the jammer and your intended transmitter with your 
binoculars, the easier it is to get in front of them) but also in terms 
of damage done - one satellite out equates to service outage to a large 
area. Knock a Starlink sat out and there are another dozen or so within 
sight that Dishy and the bent-pipe teleport can de-camp to, so you'd get 
a few dozens seconds worth of outage at most I guess.
>
> The question would be who has authority over the frequencies above the
> disputed territories.  And it is that authority that would allow, or
> disallow, the use of starlink frequencies (somewhere at 10-15GHz IIRC).
> All Starlink would need to do is request access to that spectrum.
Spectrum access isn't the issue - the spectrum that Starlink uses is 
reserved internationally for space-to-ground and ground-to-space use, 
however they still need a license from the respective government that 
has legislative control over the ground stations in their territory to 
be able to use that spectrum. But that presumes peacetime order. I don't 
think Gaza is awash with radio inspectors checking licences right now.
>
> > Jamming isn't really all that easy (again, ask Russia): To jam
> > Starlink successfully in an area, you'd have to jam the satellites
> > (probably about a dozen most of the time, and changing all the time)
> > from the ground in the same area as the Dishys using them.
> >
> I am interested in the legislation part of that, not the technical.

So which law currently applies in Gaza, and who enforces it? It's 
difficult enough to get a competent radio inspector to turn up at a site 
in some Western countries. In some places, they don't even exist, or 
have no means to investigate off-label use of communication equipment. I 
mentioned Tonga here last year, where marine VHF radio all but replaced 
the domestic wired telephone network for a long time in the northern 
island group of Vava'u, for example.

-- 

****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel at auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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