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Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by _bxg1 on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @05:53PM (#21141161)
Aren't some of them planning to use lasers? They'd have a hard time blocking that.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by jagger27 on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:02PM (#21141230)
Lasers between them in orbit is what I've heard, nothing about ground stations, AFAIK.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by m12k on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:09PM (#21141290)
Yeah, probably not much point in making an internet connection that only works without cloud cover.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by yellowapple on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @07:05PM (#21141729)
I'd imagine a laser at typical radio wavelengths would be just as susceptible to cloud-cover-induced interference as a non-laser at typical radio wavelengths, no? Not that even lasers would be necessary to mitigate jamming; ordinary beam-forming / directional antennas should be enough (barring some really sophisticated jamming technology of which I'm not aware, or the Iraqi government putting up and maintaining permanent chaff clouds or something similarly outlandish).

Jammers (to my knowledge) operate by actively producing an inverted copy of the signals it actually sees. That is: it'd be reliant on non-directional signals. Any directionality / beam-forming would make jamming a lot harder, since it makes it a lot harder for the jammers to actually see the signal in the first place (let alone produce an inverted-waveform copy of it).

Jamming also tends to get in the way of other radio communications, so even if it was actually effective against satellite communications, it'd be a last resort and would likely cause all sorts of other issues.

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @07:47PM (#21142017)
> Jammers (to my knowledge) operate by actively producing an inverted copy of the signals it actually sees.

No. Usually, all you need is to do is to send a signal - any signal - on a frequency you want to jam with enough power to overwhelm the target signal. A directional antenna won't get a milliwatt satellite signal if it starts picking up half a kilowatt of random noise, even if that noise is coming from the side. It's essentially a matter of how much power your jammer radiates and how high you can put it. Whether or not jamming interferes with other radio communication depends on how much of the spectrum your jamming signal covers.

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by yellowapple on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @08:40PM (#21142419)
Seems like it'd be pretty straightforward to block signals coming from the side (e.g. by putting some metal or something else similarly RF-blocking between the antenna and the jammer), no? Kinda like how wearing a hat helps keep the sun out of your eyes. Actively jamming the jammer (i.e. inverting the signal received from the jammer side and rebroadcasting on the the antenna side) would help, too, though this probably makes it easier to detect. And yeah, the higher the jammer, the harder it is to block it without blocking the signal you're trying to actually see (but it's still possible; if it wasn't, then modern astronomers would have a much harder time picking out interesting things amidst the menagerie of cosmic background radiation bouncing about).

There are plenty of other strategies, too (like not sticking to a single frequency, or picking frequencies that are likely to be too valuable to block with such a blunt-force method).

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by TeMPOraL on Thursday October 03, 2019 @05:01AM (#21144982)
> Seems like it'd be pretty straightforward to block signals coming from the side (e.g. by putting some metal or something else similarly RF-blocking between the antenna and the jammer), no?

Depends on the wavelength and your surroundings. Imagine yourself wearing a cap that's little too small and half-transparent on the edges, walking on fresh snow, surrounded by snow mounds, trying to spot something on one of the hilltops nearby. So the cap mostly protects you from direct jamming signal, but reflections and bleed are still painful.

Now we're talking here about satellites, in particular LEO satellites, so you need a mass market (or at least commercial-grade) tracking antenna, which will have to look all across the sky and not just point straight up. In urban environments, there's a great chance there will be scores of decent reflectors (buildings) all around you for the jamming signal to bounce off, and as for bands, the ones used by Starlink are ones that are unlikely to be used much for anything else in places like Iraq - so they may as well just jam the whole band. And since Starlink is a commercial service, you won't be able to switch to something the government depends on (not to mention procure new antennas and adjust software on the transceivers).

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by yellowapple on Thursday October 03, 2019 @01:33PM (#21149582)
> Imagine yourself wearing a cap that's little too small and half-transparent on the edges, walking on fresh snow, surrounded by snow mounds, trying to spot something on one of the hilltops nearby. So the cap mostly protects you from direct jamming signal, but reflections and bleed are still painful.

The usual answer, then, would be a polarized filter and a more narrow aperture (e.g. goggles). The narrower the FOV, the less risk of glare.

That does mean an antenna will have to actively keep itself pointed at a moving point in the sky, but with GPS, a compass, a clock, and each satellite's orbital parameters, that should be a solvable problem.

The harder problem would be for the satellite to pick out the signal coming back from the ground without having to limit itself to a single ground station.

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by bifrost on Thursday October 03, 2019 @12:49AM (#21143823)
> imagine a laser at typical radio wavelengths

Huh?

Radios are Kilo/Mega/Gigahertz.

Light is Terahertz.

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by yellowapple on Thursday October 03, 2019 @01:26AM (#21143997)
Okay, sorry, "electromagnetic radiation amplified and collimated in the same manner as a laser does to visible light". Better?
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by lloeki on Thursday October 03, 2019 @04:15AM (#21144776)
Like beamforming, or something more extreme like a maser?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by bifrost on Monday October 07, 2019 @06:30PM (#21186687)
As an aside, the Maser wikipedia article is a bit incorrect.

> The laser works by the same principle as the maser, but produces higher frequency coherent radiation at visible wavelengths.

There are plenty of lasers in the non-visible spectrum, I use IR lasers all the time.

Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by yellowapple on Thursday October 03, 2019 @10:02PM (#21154173)
A maser's what I had in mind, but either would likely work reasonably well.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by _bxg1 on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:04PM (#21141251)
I could've sworn somebody was planning to use lasers to communicate from the satellite to a ground station, claiming it would improve latency. Maybe I misread.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by jsjohnst on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:57PM (#21141661)
Lasers alone won’t improve latency, but they would certainly impact reliability. Radio waves already travel at essentially the speed of light.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by Rebelgecko on Thursday October 03, 2019 @09:02AM (#21146455)
It's been done in the past. I think the main benefits are preserving EM spectrum and some theoretical improvement in bits per watt
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by ceejayoz on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:02PM (#21141233)
The lasers are for inter-satellite comms, where there’s no atmosphere to interfere.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by aaomidi on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:01PM (#21141223)
wat how are lasers working in this scenario
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by icebraining on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @08:27PM (#21142326)
Each end (satellite and ground station) point a laser at each other, which they modulate according to the data they wish to send. The other end has a sensor (much like in a camera) that captures the light, and processes it to recover the data (demodulate). It's much like fiber optics, except over air instead of a cable.
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by abhishekjha on Thursday October 03, 2019 @08:07AM (#21146027)
How much power would such a laser emitter require? That is a huge distance to cover. Wouldn't it get attenuated over the distance?
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by Rebelgecko on Thursday October 03, 2019 @09:04AM (#21146466)
Lasers are subject to the same inverse squared law as regular radio waves. However with lasers you're starting with a smaller beam so the attentuation is actually less
Re:Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, s... by baybal2 on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:32PM (#21141501)
Do you realise that most of satellite jamming is done on uplink, not downlink?

This is how Cubans jammed US milcom and few civilian satellites since nineties