How to Jam a Worldwide Satellite TV Broadcast

An anonymous reader submits: "According to an MSNBC article, 'it's simply a matter of aiming a strong signal at the uplink transponder on the satellite and overwhelming the...broadcaster's signals...You need a dish, some power, not too much. You put up a test pattern ... and do a sweep and find the transponder on the satellite you want to jam. It could even be smaller than the standard 6-meter dish. It could be a small dish with a lot of power.' This was apparently how an Iranian satellite television station was knocked off of Loral Skynet's TelStar-12 a few days ago. Loral contacted TLS, a company which specializes in satellite broadcast security, who quickly located the source of the jamming to Cuba."

Comments

Already been done here...

[Rorschach1]

See the story of Captain Midnight and HBO..

http://www.signaltonoise.net/library/captmidn.ht m

Re:Already been done here...

[K8Fan]

I was watching at the time it happened. HBO likes to spin that the signal was never clear, and that the handled the interference quickly. My experience was that the signal he sent was every bit as clear as HBO's own signal. It's funny that it happened during "The Falcon & The Snowman", a film about a couple of Americans who become spys for the Soviets - and screw up royally.

Re:Already been done here...

[Nogami_Saeko]

Yes, but what the article was proposing was that joe-backyard with his old 12 foot dish, and a bit of extra hardware could DOS the satellites.

Not quite the same as a guy who works at a regular satellite uplink pointing the dish elsewhere and cranking up the power. There's nothing especially difficult.

For a number of years I worked with a C-band uplink (originally analog, then digitally compressed). We normally ran around 70-80 watts as I recall, but we could boost the power in the event of bad weather, etc.

Satellite operators always keep a close eye on the uplink power that sites are putting out, and tend to get very vocal, very quickly if you start hammering the bird enough to cause interference on other transponders. Of course it goes without saying that the uplink frequency is also rather important as transmitting on the downlink freq. won't accomplish too much.

But that said, it's not terribly difficult to do - anyone with a moderate size dish (and they can be quite small as were displayed at the recent NAB trade show), a decent power transmitter, and a knowledge of the uplink frequencies used could interfere with satellite relatively easily.

Using a regular dish could be a little tricky - you need a dish that has a proper waveguide from the transmitter to focus the beam properly on the dish and send it up. It may be possible to modify a regular receive-only dish to transmit this way, but I doubt it would be anywhere near as efficient as professional gear.

If someone was using portable professional gear, it could be difficult to trace people doing this because they could conceivably be anywhere within the satellite footprint, and they'd be broadcasting a rather narrow beam upwards. The old vans driving around with the direction finders wouldn't be picking up too much if it was aligned carefully with good shielding to reduce leakage.

N.

The tricky thing is....

[PS-SCUD]

How do you make this illegal? If they can beam their signal onto your house, why can't you beam yours at them?

The even more tricky thing is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you make it illegal, how do you stop people from simply doing it from Cuba (as the jammers in the article did)? Satellites, it doesn't really matter what country you're in if you want to contact them.. that's their strength, but..

Re:The even more tricky thing is:

[SagSaw]

You don't even have to be in a country. Nothing would stop you from doing this from a boat in international waters. It really wouldn't have to be that big of a boat either.

Re:The even more tricky thing is:

[isorox]

SO I'm sailing across the atlantic, under a U.K. Flag, and the U.S. Navy blows me out of the water? Isnt that piracy on the high seas?

cool , but much cooler things can be done (DSS!)

[pigscanfly.ca]

such as using the transponders to carry your own signal . Most sat tv satelites are essnetially dumb transponders , which means (essentially) they receive a signal on one end and pump it out the other end . What is cool is that using DSS (direct sequencing spread spectrum) you can transmit your own data and people will think that it is background noise . I beleive correctly some russians were doing this awhile back and it went on for a couple of years before they got caught.

Countermeasures

[td]

As has been pointed out, people have been jamming satellite uplinks since Capt Midnite & HBO. So why haven't the satellite folks gone to jam-resistant technology? (I know, it's because of the essential laziness of corporate culture -- geez, it was a rhetorical question.) Spread spectrum is essentially unjammable, if done right (i.e. with cryptographically generated spreading sequences or some such cryptogeek mumbojumbo.)

Re:Hah! That's nothing.

[Talisman]

We were sailing off the coast of Spain once and the Spanish Navy was running military exercises nearby. They had a jammer that scrambled GPS signals, in this case by stripping out all the Westward coordinates.

The navigational system that shows the ship superimposed on a map by using a GPS feed had us squarely in the center of the Sahara :)

The ex-Soviet republics are _THE_WORST_ for radar interference. I swear they think someone is going to launch an attack on them every minute of the day. NOTHING but an orgy of signal jamming/scrambling when you get near their coasts. C-Band, INMARSAT, GPS...all yolked.

Tal

How to find out the location of a jammer?

[Psychic Burrito]

Can somebody tell me how the source of such a jamming can be found? The satellite's receiver doesn't have a locator from which direction it is receiving something from, doesn't it? So how is it done? Thanks!

Guanta what bay??

[XSforMe]

I bet I can pinpoint the location in Cuba without the need of any telco equipment.

Jamming from Cuba, the how and why

[InklingBooks]

I once asked a friend who designed satellite antenna system what it would take to take over a channel and he said it would be fairly easy. The typical uplink is 30 watts into the sort of large dishes you see at TV studios. Because the link is FM (regular TV is reduced carrier SSB), a signal about twice as strong would 'capture' the receiver and the legitimate signal would simply disappear.

What's really intriguing about this story is the Cuba/Iran link. For years we've been told that religious extremism in the Middle East was a close kin of religious conservatives (Jewish and Christian) in the US. Yet when Iraq's brutal dictator recently began to cloak himself in Islamic rhetoric, it was primarily the political left in the US and Europe, who wanted to see him left in power. Their old love affair with Stalin was turned on to the foul Saddam.

Now Iran, an Islamic theocracy, is having trouble with dissidents demanding democracy and who comes to its aid but virtually the only remaining Communist dictatorship in the world.

Very interesting. It seems that some groups simply want to see the great mass of people regimented and are indifferent to the ideology used to justify the regimentation. Religious or secular, Marxist or Facist, it is all the same to them. Mussolini was, after all, a communist before he was a facist and Nazism had people who were called "beefsteak Nazis"--brown on the outside and red inside. Then there is the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Hitler may have intended to break it at the earliest opportunity, but Stalin seems to have been sincerely surprised when Hitler broke it.

Re:muhaha!

[throwaway18]

>send a really powerful signal [...] and you can permanently fry that transponder,

No, you can't permanently damage a satellite this way.

The path loss to a satellite in geostationary orbit is around 200dB. Estimate 50dB with a massive dish on the ground and 30dB gain on the satellite. Assume you need to get a watt of power into the satellite to physicall damage the front end.

You need aproximatly 1 TeraWatt into your dish. The voltage part of the electromagnetic wave will exceed the breakdown voltage of air and you will just produce a lot of plasma in the beampath above your dish. (You can exceed the voltage breakdown of air with a really powerfull laser and get sparks in mid air.)

An interesting link...

[WgT2]

That Iranian TV station is a station that has been used in lue of cell phones, and other communications within Iran, to organize protests against the current hard line religious government (because the same government shuts them down). These protests are likely to be precursors to the current member of the 'Axis of Evil' (and I don't mean that sarcastically at all) falling in a relatively peaceful means. Read: U.S. troops not having any intervention therein and the Iranian people freeing and regulating themselves.

The fact that the jamming signal has been found to be originating from Cuba should be telling of what kind of animal the Cuban government is:

It is willing to side with an enemy (hard line Islamist) that has a common enemy (the U.S.) whom upon the destruction of that common enemy (the U.S.) would in turn start its war on them (Cuba).

Besides being telling of the nature of Communist it is also foolish of them.

Surprising it hasn't happened sooner

[jordandeamattson]

While watching the Tinammen Square Massacare and then discussing it at MacHack in 1989, we discussed the fesability of not just taking Chinese television of the air, but actually taking control of it and getting the real message of what was happening out to the world.

After a few hours of discussion with some extremely bright folks, we came to the conclusion that 1) it could be done, 2) that it could be done easily, and 3) that we really didn't want the Chinese security services and the US Department of State and the FCC all coming after us.

What is surprising, is that this hasn't yet been done in any large scale way. The reality is that small forces of 2 and 3 people can wreck havoc in our increasingly connected world. I believe that what keeps this in check is the level of concerns that kept us in check. But what happens we you don't have those concerns? When you have nothing to lose? Then you have the cyber-equivalent of the Palestenian sucide bombers.

Cuba / Guantanamo Bay listening stations

[securitas]

In addition to the U.S. military base and Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, I seem to recall that there is an NSA/CIA/DIA electronic signals intercept and listening station at Guantanamo.

From the book ''The U.S. Intelligence Community''
At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are more than 100 members of the Guantanamo Naval Security Group Activity. Employing an AN/FRD-10 antenna system, the unit intercepts Cuban and Soviet military communications in and around Cuba and the Caribbean Basin.

It seems more likely that jamming an Iranian satellite signal would come from the American dishes at the Guantanamo installation than from Cubans.

The Soviets/Russians also had a major electronic signals listening station at Lourdes, Cuba (its largest foreign military base) that was aimed at intercepting American telephone calls and computer communications, but the Russians shut it down in 2002 after pressure and inducements from the USA. The base was set up after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Re:A 500 watt maser tuned to the proper frequency

[imsabbel]

Problem with maser:
1. at least half of your 500watt will be lost somewhere in the air (water vapour ect)
2. Maser/Laser arent "ideal", parallism is a tradeoff: you can use a large dish to widen the beam and limit dispersion, but you get a lower energy density in your beam.

500watt wont be enough.

btw: i doubt youll get a 2 inch beam at 40 meter distance, much less at 40000 km, which you need to reach the geo.

Similar to problems with 2-way satellite broadband

[torklugnutz]

My mom wanted to install a 2 way satellite broadband connection in the motorhome. The DirecWay people said it was impossible to have a mobile dish, because if the uplink signal crosses over into someone elses (like a TV channel) bandwidth, DirecWay gets fined $10,000 per minute. The FCC requires the system to be installed by a professional, as a result. Off the subject now, but it can be done in a mobile situation, by using an expensive ($5000) computerized positioning system. Back to what's relevant, if you tried doing something like jamming a network's satellite signal, you'd be putting yourself at a pretty good financial risk.

Re:A 500 watt maser tuned to the proper frequency

[wfmcwalter]

but you get a lower energy density in your beam.

Quite, but unlike regular applications of parabolic reflectors, we don't want to receive/emit collimated radiation - we want to use a (very) slightly nonparabolic reflector to bring our signal'o'doom to an approximate focus out there at 40000km. We want low energy density down here where the air is thick, and the highest possible up there at the warm end of the equation. Still (as throwaway's very astute comment points out) it's going to need to be a whopping dish on the ground to get this to work. I doubt my Radio Shack storecard will cover the cost...

Aside: man, this conversation is going to get us all sent to Guantanamo. We can hardly claim that we only intend to zap axis of evil comsats, as the most hi-tech weapon in the cuban arsenal is an asthmatic donkey with a straw hat.

The Running Man?

[checkyoulater]

Didn't Mick Fleetwook and Dweezil Zappa do this in The Running Man? Remember the scene towards the end where Ben Richards discovers the dead bodies of the so-called winners of the Running Man game? It is at that time he is captured by the resistance (for lack of a better term). He then helps them capture the satellite. If I recall all they had was a bunch of machine guns and one clever geek who made that girl remember the uplink code.