alt Hacker NewsYes, but it is more difficult than jamming a typical radio antenna because the starlink uses a directed beam rather than a omnidirectional radio broadcast. This either requires enormous amounts of power, targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam, or getting between the satellite and the ground station by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere.
The above is for jamming directed beams in general. It is likely that starlink has a number of other jamming countermeasures.
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Just to add more details.
Beamforming is essentially yet another way to achieve gain, just like one does with a directional antenna. The Starlink terminal achieves a gain of roughly 33 dB, which means it talks (and also listens) in the peak direction at power levels that are around 2000x higher than what one would achieve with isotropic antennas. 2000x sounds like a lot, but it is actually not impossible to reach. Consumer electronics sends at most a few Watts of RF power, but serious jammers of the type used by militaries can run kilowatts. If you consider the peak power used for brief moments of time then you can get as high as megawatts - the famous AWACS aircraft briefly flash half a continent at somewhere around 1 MW, with average TX power of ~single digit kilowatt.
Possible, yes, but the Iranian government almost certainly isn't capable of doing so, much less across the entire country.
Even Russians don't seem to be able to jam Starlink on the Ukrainian battlefields.
China, maybe.
Huge idiot here with an honest question: with starlink, could a rogue actor just point a bunch of high-powered lasers at the satellites and brick them?
Multibeam too, right?
>targeting the satellite itself with a directed radio beam
And good luck targeting enough Starlink satellites...
Bouncing signals off of the ionosphere is most definitely not an option here. The bandwidth of the signals that Starlink needs in order to provide service are far wider than the range of frequencies that bounce off any layer of the ionosphere. If you could get a 10GHz signal to bounce off of the F layer, you'd have a lot of very excited amateur radio operators who would start using that instead of the moon as their reflector.