Ukrainian troops report outages of Musk Starlink devices | Hacker News Reader

Ukrainian troops report outages of Musk Starlink devices

theguardian.com

10 pointsngrilly3 comments

Weak signals. The receivers can suffer from desense jamming. A broad band high power signal can be made to exceed the strength of the genuine signal and cause the steered array to aim in the wrong direction. I expect this cat/mouse game is ongoing and Starlink is under constant pressure. The US/UK may be able direcionalise the jamming and some of the anti-radar missiles adjusted in what they lock to frequency wise to hit these sites. The Starlink signal ranges broadly. https://www.americantv.com/what-frequency-does-starlink-use.... .

The US/UK may be able direcionalise the jamming and some of the anti-radar missiles adjusted in what they lock to frequency wise to hit these sites.

In a further iteration of the cat-and-mouse-game, the signals from the Starlink units can be detected and used as a target for Russian signal-homing missiles. A Starlink terminal would require to be close to the command post. Hit the terminal, kill the commander.

It is my understanding that they follow a minimally observable protocol and power up the terminals for needed traffic. The traffic will be encrypted and designed to shorten the time window during which the enemy can acquire response data. I have not seen any news about numbers of Starlink terminals found/destroyed - but operational security will lead Ukraine to deny intercepts and at the same time Russia boasting about hundreds destroyed. I am not sure how far away the Starlink Antenna can be from the control console. One would anticipate shielded cables for data. The high Ghz RF will be in the plane of the antenna - control data will not leak, being data and not high Ghz RF = nothing to leak and it could be 500 feet away from the dish in case of an incoming missile. In addition, there will be foot pickets to detect infiltrators, and few Russian will volunteer to sneak up on them. Russians are more likely to state they walked the whole area for 8 hours and saw nothing, even as they lay flat in a trench. Russians have few professional soldiers, they are wealthy in buck passers as their system rewards and promotes buck passers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com