> I'm way more excited about the super stable jitter
Indeed - significant quality of life improvement for drone operators !
Indeed - significant quality of life improvement for drone operators !
Now its worse, the Russians also use them [1].
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/11/ukraine-intelligenc...
Russia has publicly mentioned having 2.4 and 5 Ghz truck mounted scanners
(Tobol)
I'm thinking something like 100m but maybe that doesn't make much difference under shelling.
You certainly can't be mobile anymore with this setup.
We use optical fiber instead but this requires a very large, heavy and warm battery to stay very close to the Starlink dish while the operator can now be kilometers away. You can now disable the Starlink Wifi router but only if you patch the encrypted firmware and spoof the account credentials. SpaceX calls that illegal and will disable and brick your hardware as soon as they find out. Doing this extensive conversion is only for very capable hackers and has been done by only three people on our planet, as far as I am aware [2][3]. If you need similar patching and optical wireing, we will be happy to eductate you, for a small fee.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet
[2] https://hackaday.com/2023/08/31/diving-into-starlinks-user-t...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/starlink-internet-dish-hack/
It would be dwarfed by the emanations from the, you know, space transmitter co-located with it. Locating the dish isn’t the issue, the proposal was using fiber to make the dish (detectable) and the operator (vulnerable) separated by distance.
For example, do you trust SpaceX to not relay your location to your enemy? Do you want to broadcast your identity at all if there can be a man-in-the-middle-attack? A dozen other reasons....
A military service would probably use wider beams coming from the satellite, as well as different encryption (making it impossible to distinguish which terminal is being transmitted to on which beam and not using correlatable identifiers on unencrypted protocol layers at all).
Using civilian communications technology like cell phones has been a bad idea, as evidenced in the same conflict.
Use Starlink dishes as phased array point to point links across 500 km without the v2 Satellites?
There are 200 Ukrainian drone startups alone, many more in other countries. They all hack firmware. Hacker News readers should not be surprised.
If the protocol requires you to reveal your precise location to the network (so that satellite beams can correctly target you), how would you get around that using your own open firmware/hardware?
The same goes for authentication using (potentially) long-term stable or even public identifiers, as is the case for e.g. the IMSI with GSM (not sure if later 3GPP generations finally fixed that): A GSM network won't let you attach without revealing your IMSI over the radio interface at least once. You can spoof it, but then you won't get any service.
> Use Starlink dishes as phased array point to point links across 500 km without the v2 Satellites?
That's a completely different scenario than the one we're talking about here ("why can't military users relatively easily put some distance between the Starlink terminal and its users in a warzone?"), and one which I'd assume the military to have existing solutions for.
Are Starlink terminals really directional enough for EMI from an Ethernet port to be a bigger omnidirectional concern than the many watts of power they transmit skywards as part of their normal operation?
Different wavelengths, infrared its already a target in a warzone.
>10Ghz is another type receiver.
I also think UWB radio is going to be big in the future for communicating with nearby devices in warzones.
In the end, any sufficiently efficient signal is indistinguishable from noise to anybody but the intended receiver(s), no?
As I understand it, the same is true for e.g. DSSS (for receivers not knowing the spreading code), and the primary advantage of UWB is its precise ranging capability (due to its ability to reject multipath propagation errors and the generally high bandwidth, yielding better spatial resolution).
A transceiver could use attosecond 10^−18, femtosecond 10^−15 picosecond 10^−12 or nanosecond 10^−9 pulses at very irregularly intervals. That seems (almost) random to any observer but not to a receiver which has pre-agreed those irregularly intervals with the transmitter (for example with quantum key distribution, with entangled particles). The receiver measures if there was a signal or not. It does not use power level, frequency, or phase (or a combination of these) of a sinusoidal wave but by generating radio energy at specific time intervals and occupying a large bandwidth, thus enabling pulse-position or time modulation.
Not just spacial distribution can be used. You could use polarised photons, electron spin, etc.
In my wafer scale integration [2] I use very few free space photos to flip a 1 v transistor in an ultra wideband mode.
I refer you to [3] for [4] for a better explanation, even though ultra wideband is not mentioned specifically.
Contact me directly, I'll be happy to lecture for a few hours to answer your question.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=ultra+...
[2] Smalltalk and Self Hardware https://vimeo.com/731037615
[3] Stanford Seminar - Saving energy and increasing density in information processing using photonics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hWWyuesmhs&t=272s
[4] Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communications: a Tutorial Review https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05510
For UWB, the energy of the signal is spread over a much wider frequency band, of at least a few GHz and up to tens of GHz. Therefore UWB behaves like a white noise with a much greater bandwidth than DSSS.
It is not difficult to jam the entire band that can be used by certain kinds of DSSS signals or to receive all of it and process it digitally to search for signals within it.
Such operations are much more difficult for the much greater bandwidth used by an UWB signal.
And regarding jamming resistance: Couldn't a jammer just transmit random pulses in the frequency band in question? Why is jamming harder than just transmitting a lot of useless data on the same channel using whatever modulation the targeted transmitter uses as well? Or is there just too much space (or rather, time) to cover with reasonable transmit power?
The Starlink terminal is already a giant transmitter, after all.
Isn't it possible out of the box these days in "bypass mode"?
https://www.starlinkhardware.com/how-to-bypass-the-starlink-...
And no, a GUI check box has little relation to what the hardware actually does.
You're moving goal posts now. If the stock firmware/software now allows disabling Wi-Fi, you don't need to hack the hardware.
And if you can't trust the stock firmware, i.e. you have reason to assume that it's actively malicious (e.g. by turning the Wi-Fi back on randomly), how can you trust the hardware? Who's to say that it doesn't, e.g., have an undocumented transponder feature that replies to a specific type of interrogation?
>You're moving goal posts now.
I'd say you where interpreting my comments on hacking too narrowly.
They are a bit upset that Musk refused to allow them an offensive use of Starlink which would have, in his opinion, escalated the war.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/musk-says-he-refused-ky...
"The first casualty when war comes is truth"
[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=starlin...
Your comment seems to contradict itself. The technology is so valuable that the GUR is upset Musk didn't provide it to them, but not so valuable that deployed units and operators would be targeted?
I think this war has demonstrated that Starlink is priceless.