Alcun Atirutan BBS

context: starlink in ukraine

how do otherwise intelligent people make such dumb comments

@deprecated_ii Could you please unfold it a bit? Indeed Russians killed Gen. Dudayev with an anti-radiation missile, which they programmed to home in on his Inmarsat set. But the situation is completely different if Musk seeds Ukraine with thousands of terminals. Is this my Reddit brain talking?

@zaitcev Starlink is going to cut both ways for the Ukrainians, especially as the Russians gain more control over developed areas

I seriously doubt they'll just drop guided bombs on receivers, but rather they'll use triangulation to investigate them, as potential Ukrainian military holdouts

A few thousand receivers sounds like a lot but if they start seeing transmissions in places where there aren't any settlements, that's obviously a good place to start looking

@zaitcev @deprecated_ii I wonder if antiradiation missiles could detect starlink, it does beamforming so it should only really have a strong EM node pointing at the satellite, rather than just broadcast upward like sat phones.

@kazriko @zaitcev I'm no expert on radio or beam forming, but the phased array beam forming stuff I've seen produced significant side lobes

maybe that can be mitigated in a design where you want a tight beam that's minimally detectable, but I doubt they bothered for a civilian ground station built to a budget

@deprecated_ii @zaitcev Yeah, I would think that the missile would have to stumble on a side note to see it, rather than it just kind of being visible from the air like old portable sat phones.