this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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I remember reading that drug cartells in South America are using disused military communications satellites.
These satellites simply takes a signal recieved on one band and rebroadcast it on another band over a wide area, so as long as the satellite can pick up your signal you can basically talk to an entire continent at once, all while remaining anonymous.
There must be some additional steps. Otherwise those satellites would be overloaded by hooligans.
Someone tell me how to join team "satellite hooligan".
You can get a cheap SDR for a few bucks and an antenna for about the same. The rest is software and ingenuity.
Is it illegal to do this? I mean they aren't being used anymore so no harm no foul right?
The legality is questionable, but just listening is harmless.
Nope, lol. These suckers are fucking ancient. There isn’t any processing, you can’t overload something that isn’t actually reading the data or using a protocol.
They still use energy, no? To relay signals on another frequency. That should come from somewhere, and also the more different signals, the more noise. And without their input frequency being regulated, there must be lots of noise.
You can do this same attack on any antenna, noise can't be protocolled away. Repeating both signal and noise is a downside to bent-pipe setups.
Input frequencies are regulated via band-pass filters.
I'm not talking about technical things, just that IRL on regulated frequencies one can do something because people using it for bullshit are legally prosecuted. Depends on wavelength, of course.
But OK, now I think I get what you are talking about.
Oh. Yeah most bands used by satellites are also regulated.
Well the biggest steps I'm going to assume are having a satellite dish, knowing where to point it, knowing what to send, then hope that someone is listening. Much easier for a hooligan to throw a rock at someone or find a can of spray paint
That's fuckin rad, I love satellites! So eerie and mysterious ~