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Comment by ece | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam? Combined with some sort of frequency hopping and a moving constellation should mean blocking a user or satellite signal should be pretty hard, like many times the cost of building and servicing a user terminal for use against protesters.

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> Doesn't Starlink use some sort wideband signal which is hard to jam?

It probably is hard to jam, but you don't need to jam it if you can pinpoint terminal locations and send in on-the-ground enforcers to confiscate the equipment and make arrests. TV detector vans were introduced in 1952[1], the principles for finding sources of RF emissions isn't cutting edge technology.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van

TV emissions don't use beam forming. This is all a cat and mouse game, but Starlink being a distributed system should mean it is harder to completely block use of.

See my other comment upthread on how beamforming doesn't make terminals/emissions invisible, just harder to acquire, but well within reach of a determined adversary. Newer Starlink terminals have a 1.5° beam, and older ones are 3.4° wide . At 10,000 feet altitude, the tighter beam is 245 feet across. Starlink satellite orbits are public and predictable, and Iran has drones to spare.

This is just 1 passive RF-based approach, and there are others (e.g. drone-mounted FLIR surveys done at 3 am)

Like I said, this is a cat and mouse game, if you had terminals to spare or even just fake battery operated transmitting antennas, you could waste a lot of drone time. There are also masking techniques and it's not like the drones can't be tracked or misguided. It would take orders of magnitude more effort to stop Starlink than to keep using it minimally. Iran is a big country, it just depends on how determined and prepared the protestors are to evade censorship. Which by itself is hopefully just a start to other actions.

You realize Iran is pretty big with lots of people and Iran can't run around with detector van across all those regions and people. Specially when they potentially lose control over certain areas. And those vans can be disabled pretty easily as well, specially in a proto-war zone.

That said, this would only be true if there were enough people with terminals.

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