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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be surprised if someone developed a jammer for starlink. Given the signal levels and the relative receptivity their antenna has to signals coming from the sides (a common problem I'm told of phased arrays where the array edges are not benefiting from antennas on one side) one could presumably just barrage jam at the downlink frequencies. Of course you would either need to be really 'loud' or pretty close to do that.

I also felt it kind of a dick move to "brag" about giving Ukraine Starlink terminals on social media as it informs your adversaries that you have another channel they have to go out and shut down. Much better (in my opinion of course) to keep it as discreet as possible so that opponents are guessing.

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They were requested publicly on social media. If they were requested privately, it would indeed have been terrible opsec to respond publicly.

Giving companies the green light to brag about help provided might also encourage others to help for PR reasons. More help, even a little, might be more important than being covert.

Satellite communications can be extremely resilient to jamming. The reason being that it's easy to filter out RF from every direction but above with a very simple antenna. Depending on the constellation and the angle of the satellite relative to the antenna it could be close to impossible without an aircraft or something directly in the terminal's line-of-sight.

Phased array (which they use) is leakier than a physical directional antenna.

Citation? Some quick googling suggests that if you want to become more jam resistant, you switch to phased arrays.

Which would be what intuitively makes sense to me, though I'm not an expert in phased arrays. If you have more gain straight up, then you must have less gain in other directions.

Afaik, Starlink phased arrays have very high gain (low beamwidth), so they must have proportionally lower gain in other directions, or else it wouldn't add up and you'd have overunity.

As someone who has had to manually satellite TV dish, AFAIK, there's always guidelines on the specific angles you need to orient your dish at. Couldn't an adversary place satellites to also broadcast noise in roughly the same direction?

Satellite TV dishes are pointed at satellites that remain in the same position of the sky relative to the satellite. These are in geosynchronous orbit meaning they orbit the earth once every 24 hours. (Which is what makes them appear stationary to Earth stations).

In contrast, the Starlink satellites are zooming around the planet orbit once every 95 minutes[1] or so. At any given time, there are many Starlink satellites "visible" and the antenna tracks them using a technique called "phased array antenna tracking." This is the same way multi-target RADAR works on modern ships and planes.

Anyway, the cool think about Starlink (I just installed mine) is that you put it up where there is a lot of "sky" visible, and then the antenna moves itself to maximize the area of sky that it's antenna can "see". It is very cool and an amazing bit of engineering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

I don't think that's fair, the vice prime Minister of Ukraine asked him to do it on Twitter. I'm not sure discreetness was ever a goal from the other side

He mentioned in a follow up that it's worth operating with caution if in Ukraine, suggesting that the Russians can likely locate the ground station using ELINT tools and either destroy it or otherwise overrun it.

The goal is publicity. The brag is the most important thing.

Just like with the Thai cave rescue.

Ukraine gov't specifically asked for it, publically. And of course, Russia government responded with anger. "Publicity" is naive. Unquestionably what Elon is doing now is provocative to Russia (and the handful of pro-Russia countries), but at a time when most places don't want to be friends with Russia, it's great PR but more importantly, it has real effects for people on the ground. It sends materialistic support and and condemnation which encourages others to follow suit.

Do you mean the most important thing for SpaceX? Because it's also important for Ukraine not just to win on the technological front but also to seem like they're winning, and bragging about capabilities helps their propaganda effort. "We have a network you can't easily disconnect or jam, and your invasion is being livestreamed on YouTube right now" might even have the effect of discouraging some war crimes from happening. If there's even a slight positive impact it's worth it.

I hope these network terminals get used, but the messaging is important too.

Interested in the idea of Elon Musk and discretion.

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