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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."
How original. I hope someone doesn't try that on the internet.
See the story of Captain Midnight and HBO..
t m
http://www.signaltonoise.net/library/captmidn.h
I know how to solve this problem... SANCTIONS! That'll show 'em.
--
RumorsDaily
"And may God help you if that thing carried the Spice Channel."
-Moe Syzlak
This could get very very dangerous. Imagine if some terrorists got ahold of a dish (not very hard these days) and knocked out some vital communication systems. Chaos! Our only hope is that since the instructions have been Slashdotted, the terrorists can't get through.
It's... News for Nerds! Stuff that Matters! La-de-da-de-da-DE-da!
How do you make this illegal? If they can beam their signal onto your house, why can't you beam yours at them?
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Funny, the other divisions of MS seem to think it's some kind of horrible, immoral, illegal thing when you describe how to hack hardware. What happened to "very committed to respect for others' intellectual property and we request the same respect applied to our innovations"?
In other news, DirecTV was knocked off the air permanently for unexplained reasons today.
Comcast, AOL/TW, and Cox all declined to comment.
Worse, send a really powerful signal (read- military radar magnetron hooked up to mondo dish) and you can permanently fry that transponder, and do so with a burst so brief and directed that it's not terribly easy for anyone to figure out whonunnit. It's a great piece of asymetric information warfare - spend a couple of million dollars to knock out a few dozen civilian comsats, each tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth. Best of all, it's quite possibly not in breach of any international treaty !
Excuse me, I have to go now, my mechanical pirnahas are hungry...
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
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.
I work as a communications officer aboard a ship. We pulled into Cape Town on day 1 of the World Cricket Championships. One of the games was being broadcast nearby, until our active radar filled the air with distortion.
;)
;)
The second the gangway hit the deck, two sweaty, panicked cameramen came charging up, asking to speak to me. I was already at the gangway because I needed to meet a technician.
"You have to turn off your radar! We're broadcasting the World Cricket Chapmionships LIVE AND YOU KILLED OUR SIGNAL!"
Me: "Oh. Who's playing?"
Them: "Pakistan and Bangladesh."
Me: "Pakistan, eh? Yeah, I'll turn it off ASAP."
And 20 minutes later, I did
For any of you gusy that were watching that game, sorry.
Kinda
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
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.)
-Tom Duff
How to Jam a Worldwide Satellite TV Broadcast
... and do a sweep and find the transponder on the satellite you want to jam'."
"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
So who from Microsoft or General Electric is going to prison for this DMCA violation?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
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.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
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
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
According to company website they use radio interferometry. To do this they need another (relatively) nearby satellite with a similar transponder, which also sees some interference. Then they measure the arrival time difference between the signals bounced from the two satellites, using this they can then triangulate the position to within a few miles.
If you pay them lots of money they'll send out helicopter
(assuming its not in Cuba!) to find the exact antenna causing the problem.
This isn't likely to happen, specifically.
:) ), unless you take precautions. tune it too low, however, and you encounter signal loss in bad weather.
:). You'd have to actually take control of the satellite (probably not as hard as it sounds, even with modern satellites, really) to get your own signal, and then you'd do it by making it receive a different frequency and you start broadcasting.
Your average satellite receiver is setup to deliberately receive and amplify a particular signal, to make it usable by a decoder.
The satellite LNB (the device at the focal point of a satellite dish) is tuned when installed, and is specifically set to give the decoder a signal of a particular strength. This is usually measured in the order of a particular number of decibells (dB).
Most receivers will actually shut down if you overload them with signal however. It's possible for you to encounter problems when you tune an LNB, and someone goes and jacks up the output level on the satellite for some reason (like, say, they need to use it to broadcast military signals
This means, that on the satellite that's receiving the uplink, you'll find that if you overload it, it'll just shut down the receiver instead of overriding the signal.
Don't let anyone fool you into thinking you can drive everyone nuts by replacing their favorite shows with reruns of the original odd couple
ashridah
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.
Sanctions, yes. Arms? Hell no.
Remember what happened the last time that we gave people in that regions unlimited resources and guns? Let's just go out of our way to make sure that we don't do that again.
Any winner in an armed conflict is rarely going to institute anything but Marshall Law, especially in that region. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (but with new politics), meaning they have to eliminate all of the old political opponents to make the system work... as quietly as possible.
Giving the opposing side rifles would sound a little like this to me:
"YOU WILL HAVE PUBLIC RULE HERE NOW OR I WILL SHOOT EVERYONE!" (Kalashnikov firing)
Good luck Tehran. Democracy didn't come overnight here, we can't send you guns and expect that you will have anything in charge of you other than a gun-toting government from that.
They have to do it themselves. We have to sit by and watch, there is nothing we should do other than that. The intense hatred of anything US backed would simply do what it has always done in that region... make the people we back look like flunkies for the infidels.
Anyway, much love to the Iranian people. We're rooting for you and your own future. Decided by you.
Bad day for NITV... first their satellite gets jammed, and then we slashdot their site.
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.
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.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
You know, it occured to me that the TV stations in question are broadcast from the United States, and that this jamming has happened at the exact same time that there has been major unrest in Iran by people revolting against the theocracy there. The US does not approve of the Iranian theocracy; remember the "axis of evil" speech? That the jamming happened when it did seems to indicate that it was intentional, and was to the benefit of our enemies. That you therefore conclude that it was done by the US says a lot more about you than it does the US.
I would instead direct your attention here, and here. If Iran and Cuba have been working together, this suggests that the Cuban government really was the source of the jamming. If you feel sympathies towards the Cuban government such that you're unwilling to believe that they'd support the Mullahs, I suggest you reconsider them.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
"It seems more likely that jamming an Iranian satellite signal would come from the American dishes at the Guantanamo installation than from Cubans."
Armchair punditry at it's worst.
If you'd do some research about NITV The TV station is actually broadcasted from the US into Iran. That's right. National Iranian TV (NITV) is produced in the US. And no, I am not making this up.
NITV, not being state run, has government enemies in Iran for doing things like making fun of the leaders there. So the Mullahs in Iran call the Castro gang in Cuba and get them to do a favor for them.
This is something the US military would not want to block.
From the article:
three sources associated with the broadcast services confirmed that Loral Skynet, the operator of the Telstar-12 satellite used by the broadcasters, had determined the jamming was probably emanating from "the vicinity of Havana, Cuba."
One of the sources said that Loral, working with transmitter location expert TLS Inc. of Chantilly, Va., had further fixed the location as "20 miles outside of Havana." Cuba's main electronic eavesdropping base, at Bejucal, is about 20 miles outside of the Cuban capital. The base, built for Cuba by the Russians in the early 1990's, monitors and intercepts satellite communications.
5, Interesting, eh? More like 0, Stupid. The broadcasts are done by regime-critical expatriots in the US. Why would the US jam anti-iraninan broadcasts based on its own soil?
Tor
The fact that you decided to resort to a personal attack and innuendoes says far more about you than anything else you had to say. Instead of behaving like a reactionary, McCarthyist zealot and making claims about all sorts of conclusions that I supposedly reached, try reading a little closer.
I said it seems more likely that a signal would have come from Guantanamo. Considering the massive signals operation there, that's perfectly reasonable.
Someone else mentioned in the thread that it's possible that it was an accidental jam if it was the USA because mistakes like that have been known to happen. A more cynical view would be that it was intentionally done to manufacture an incident like the Gulf of Tonkin hoax that was eventually used to justify the Johnson administration's massive expansion of the war in Vietnam. The final possibility that is mentioned in the article is the Russian-built Cuban station. It seems strange that the Russians would have two stations that were only seven miles apart (before the closure of Lourdes), but that is also entirely possible.
The fact is that neither you nor I have any concrete proof of who was responsible for the jamming. Everything else is speculation.
The CNN Los Angeles bureau reported in June that the backers of the U.S.-based Iranian dissident satellite television stations are Shah-ists, showing the portraits of the Shah plastered all over the studios. We now know that a 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA, helped overthrow the short-lived, democratically elected Mossadegh government and snuffed out budding democracy in Iran. The U.S. then installed the Shah and trained his notoriously brutal SAVAK internal security forces. The Shah went on to become one of the most savage dictators of the 20th century until the Iranian revolution in 1979.
To get back in bed with the Shah's supporters today is directly counter to the stated goal of fostering a democratic, free society in Iran which might have thrived if not for the U.S.-backed coup 50 years ago.
To Phil-14: The last time I checked I have the right to free speech. It seems you would prefer that we live in a Stalinist, Communist regime that would put an end to anyone who didn't agree with your narrow point of view.
The MSNBC report may be 100% correct. An open mind will at least acknowledge that there are other possibilities.
Hello there, I would like to clear some things up and shed some light on the matter. (excuse the bad English) Firstly, a satellite related history about Iran:
... anyways). Since the channels mostly show boring old films or even more boring documentaries, most pople have digital satellite receivers and just watch show and Iranian channels.
We have 6 channels. One is news, one is sport and the other four are mixed channels, showing anything from soccer to documentaries to dubbed American films and series (yeah, death to america baby!!) to English films in original language to japanese samurai black and white films to cartoons etc.. you name it. Ofcourse the news biased towards the evils of America and the poor Palestinians getting killed and so on (one interesting thing is that when 5 Palestinians get killed, they are Martyred (and if there are any kids / women in between the killed, they are mentioned loudly, but if a school bus of Jew kids are killed, then "20 zionists were killed"
Satellite Receivers and Dishes are 'illegal' in Iran and every now and then the media's attention is focused on the matter and so the local police bitches about and raids a few houses, taking away their equipment and fining them... then gives up. This has become the norm. Since Tehran (the capital city) has over 14 million in population, going round every house and taking away their equipments was not a feasable task. I have written (at the end of this post) what they have done NOW to get the channels jammed and it seems to be working... 90 cm dishes are the norm here. They're big enough to do the job and yet small enough to be concealed easily. 60 cm versions are also available but you need a *really* good LNB (such as Nokia) to get a good signal. Now on to the NITV matter:
The National Iranian TV station (NITV) is a station based in USA and it mostly broadcasts talk shows and documentaries AGAINST the current regime in Iran so they are America's friend and Iranian government's enemy. Currently, there are 6 or 7 Iranian language satellite channels that can be received in Iran. All are transmitted from "TelStar 12" satellite. About two years ago, the only Iranian satellite channels were NITV and another one I can't remember. Both used to be broadcasted from Hotbird satellite. That
was until their signals were jammed multiple times (after a few months of broadcasting) and at the end they made the decision of moving to TelStar 12. I remember they issued a statement that Hotbird has received jamming signal FROM IRAN that has worked against the Iranian channels and so on... the funny thing is that the Iranian gov. broadcasts 4 or 5 propaganda channels to the very same "hotbird" satellite and they continued to broadcast their programmes even after Hotbird had found about their dirty trick. Don't you think those hotbird guys should have stopped broadcasting their programmes as a result ?
Since then, everyone has had to either add a new satellite dish or just add another LNB to their dish (which is set to Hotbird to get those music shows) and receive the Iranian channels as well. Recently there was a lot of talk in the "Majles" which is parliament about jamming signals being broadcast locally to stop people receive the
channels. And there was debate on whether these signals could be cancerous or not. At the end, they started to send jamming signals while the case remained open in the parliament.
At first, I laughed at the idea because a satellite dish works by concentrating bounced microwaves to a point where the LNB receives them and converts them to electrical signal. But if the government broadcasts signals locally, then the point of concentration would not be at the LNB part and so it shouldn't really matter huh ? Well, I am wrong and they have been successful (up to a certain level) to annoy the hell out of people and in some areas people can't get a signal. The jamming they are using is sweep based. From what I experienced at a friend's house, the sweep signal was on *any* channel