How to Jam a Worldwide Satellite TV Broadcast 326
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an MSNBC article, 'it's simply a matter of aiming a strong signal at the uplink transponder on the satellite and overwhelming the...broadcaster's signals...You need a dish, some power, not too much. You put up a test pattern ... and do a sweep and find the transponder on the satellite you want to jam. It could even be smaller than the standard 6-meter dish. It could be a small dish with a lot of power.' This was apparently how an Iranian satellite television station was knocked off of Loral Skynet's TelStar-12 a few days ago. Loral contacted TLS, a company which specializes in satellite broadcast security, who quickly located the source of the jamming to Cuba."
Already been done here... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.signaltonoise.net/library/captmidn.h
The tricky thing is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The even more tricky thing is: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Already been done here... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was watching at the time it happened. HBO likes to spin that the signal was never clear, and that the handled the interference quickly. My experience was that the signal he sent was every bit as clear as HBO's own signal. It's funny that it happened during "The Falcon & The Snowman", a film about a couple of Americans who become spys for the Soviets - and screw up royally.
cool , but much cooler things can be done (DSS!) (Score:5, Interesting)
Countermeasures (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The even more tricky thing is: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hah! That's nothing. (Score:5, Interesting)
The navigational system that shows the ship superimposed on a map by using a GPS feed had us squarely in the center of the Sahara
The ex-Soviet republics are _THE_WORST_ for radar interference. I swear they think someone is going to launch an attack on them every minute of the day. NOTHING but an orgy of signal jamming/scrambling when you get near their coasts. C-Band, INMARSAT, GPS...all yolked.
Tal
How to find out the location of a jammer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Guanta what bay?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Jamming from Cuba, the how and why (Score:5, Interesting)
What's really intriguing about this story is the Cuba/Iran link. For years we've been told that religious extremism in the Middle East was a close kin of religious conservatives (Jewish and Christian) in the US. Yet when Iraq's brutal dictator recently began to cloak himself in Islamic rhetoric, it was primarily the political left in the US and Europe, who wanted to see him left in power. Their old love affair with Stalin was turned on to the foul Saddam.
Now Iran, an Islamic theocracy, is having trouble with dissidents demanding democracy and who comes to its aid but virtually the only remaining Communist dictatorship in the world.
Very interesting. It seems that some groups simply want to see the great mass of people regimented and are indifferent to the ideology used to justify the regimentation. Religious or secular, Marxist or Facist, it is all the same to them. Mussolini was, after all, a communist before he was a facist and Nazism had people who were called "beefsteak Nazis"--brown on the outside and red inside. Then there is the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Hitler may have intended to break it at the earliest opportunity, but Stalin seems to have been sincerely surprised when Hitler broke it.
Re:muhaha! (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you can't permanently damage a satellite this way.
The path loss to a satellite in geostationary orbit is around 200dB. Estimate 50dB with a massive dish on the ground and 30dB gain on the satellite. Assume you need to get a watt of power into the satellite to physicall damage the front end.
You need aproximatly 1 TeraWatt into your dish. The voltage part of the electromagnetic wave will exceed the breakdown voltage of air and you will just produce a lot of plasma in the beampath above your dish. (You can exceed the voltage breakdown of air with a really powerfull laser and get sparks in mid air.)
An interesting link... (Score:2, Interesting)
That Iranian TV station is a station that has been used in lue of cell phones, and other communications within Iran, to organize protests against the current hard line religious government (because the same government shuts them down). These protests are likely to be precursors to the current member of the 'Axis of Evil' (and I don't mean that sarcastically at all) falling in a relatively peaceful means. Read: U.S. troops not having any intervention therein and the Iranian people freeing and regulating themselves.
The fact that the jamming signal has been found to be originating from Cuba should be telling of what kind of animal the Cuban government is:
Besides being telling of the nature of Communist it is also foolish of them.
Surprising it hasn't happened sooner (Score:5, Interesting)
After a few hours of discussion with some extremely bright folks, we came to the conclusion that 1) it could be done, 2) that it could be done easily, and 3) that we really didn't want the Chinese security services and the US Department of State and the FCC all coming after us.
What is surprising, is that this hasn't yet been done in any large scale way. The reality is that small forces of 2 and 3 people can wreck havoc in our increasingly connected world. I believe that what keeps this in check is the level of concerns that kept us in check. But what happens we you don't have those concerns? When you have nothing to lose? Then you have the cyber-equivalent of the Palestenian sucide bombers.
Cuba / Guantanamo Bay listening stations (Score:2, Interesting)
In addition to the U.S. military base and Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, I seem to recall that there is an NSA/CIA/DIA electronic signals intercept and listening station at Guantanamo [fas.org].
From the book ''The U.S. Intelligence Community''
At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are more than 100 members of the Guantanamo Naval Security Group Activity [jya.com]. Employing an AN/FRD-10 antenna system, the unit intercepts Cuban and Soviet military communications in and around Cuba and the Caribbean Basin.
It seems more likely that jamming an Iranian satellite signal would come from the American dishes at the Guantanamo installation than from Cubans.
The Soviets/Russians also had a major electronic signals listening station at Lourdes, Cuba [bbc.co.uk] (its largest foreign military base) that was aimed at intercepting American telephone calls and computer communications, but the Russians shut it down in 2002 after pressure and inducements from the USA [bbc.co.uk]. The base was set up after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Re:A 500 watt maser tuned to the proper frequency (Score:2, Interesting)
1. at least half of your 500watt will be lost somewhere in the air (water vapour ect)
2. Maser/Laser arent "ideal", parallism is a tradeoff: you can use a large dish to widen the beam and limit dispersion, but you get a lower energy density in your beam.
500watt wont be enough.
btw: i doubt youll get a 2 inch beam at 40 meter distance, much less at 40000 km, which you need to reach the geo.
Similar to problems with 2-way satellite broadband (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A 500 watt maser tuned to the proper frequency (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite, but unlike regular applications of parabolic reflectors, we don't want to receive/emit collimated radiation - we want to use a (very) slightly nonparabolic reflector to bring our signal'o'doom to an approximate focus out there at 40000km. We want low energy density down here where the air is thick, and the highest possible up there at the warm end of the equation. Still (as throwaway's very astute comment points out) it's going to need to be a whopping dish on the ground to get this to work. I doubt my Radio Shack storecard will cover the cost...
Aside: man, this conversation is going to get us all sent to Guantanamo. We can hardly claim that we only intend to zap axis of evil comsats, as the most hi-tech weapon in the cuban arsenal is an asthmatic donkey with a straw hat.
The Running Man? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The even more tricky thing is: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already been done here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite the same as a guy who works at a regular satellite uplink pointing the dish elsewhere and cranking up the power. There's nothing especially difficult.
For a number of years I worked with a C-band uplink (originally analog, then digitally compressed). We normally ran around 70-80 watts as I recall, but we could boost the power in the event of bad weather, etc.
Satellite operators always keep a close eye on the uplink power that sites are putting out, and tend to get very vocal, very quickly if you start hammering the bird enough to cause interference on other transponders. Of course it goes without saying that the uplink frequency is also rather important as transmitting on the downlink freq. won't accomplish too much.
But that said, it's not terribly difficult to do - anyone with a moderate size dish (and they can be quite small as were displayed at the recent NAB trade show), a decent power transmitter, and a knowledge of the uplink frequencies used could interfere with satellite relatively easily.
Using a regular dish could be a little tricky - you need a dish that has a proper waveguide from the transmitter to focus the beam properly on the dish and send it up. It may be possible to modify a regular receive-only dish to transmit this way, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as efficient as professional gear.
If someone was using portable professional gear, it could be difficult to trace people doing this because they could conceivably be anywhere within the satellite footprint, and they'd be broadcasting a rather narrow beam upwards. The old vans driving around with the direction finders wouldn't be picking up too much if it was aligned carefully with good shielding to reduce leakage.
N.