Well it seems in Mexico new cars and airplanes are coming to life here is the latest mexican designed and built sport car.

Looks like a vw bug-based kit car.

Quite right sferrin. The antenna size of the spy sats is enormous and getting bigger year by year. One of the interesting things is what these antennas are coated with in order to minimize glare and reflection and the impact of the solar winds and space junk on them. The fact that the US has been able to get the size to hundreds of meters is an amazing technological achievement to say the least. Hats off to the guys making it all happen 🙂

Do you realize what happens if you unroll a wire out in orbital space? You would be surprised how many charged particles are out there in the space these satellites operate. The large size of the antenna creates new problems for designers because they become plasma collectors. The quoted size of the antenna probably have little to do with actual antenna size and are more representative of spacing across the entire array. You run into problems with plasma regardless if you use a rigid antenna or wire aerial design, so I’d be real surprised you could hundreds of meters in real size for one monolythic antenna. By using multiple antennas across that same quoted area you’d have an excellent increase in overall sensitivity of signal and of direction when hunting sources. But any way you look at it you still have huge power demands to satisfy.

Telemetry data usually contains more than simple locational information, it basically is a stream of data filled with every bit of information pertinent to the unit. A nuclear missile design might issue all sorts of data from internal pressures to fuel levels all the way down to oscillations of the nose. Scientists could then record the data and damn near recreate the entire test within a simulation to determine if the real-time stream of data matched their predictions. The reason we care about the data is that we usually can read the information as well as the enemy, if not better, which is why telemetry interception is the bread and butter of sigint.

Furthermore, signal eavesdropping via satellite is not a simple record and process function. The atmosphere is very thin above 36000 feet and as you continue above 5 miles from the surface you run into all sorts of charged particles. Trying to pick out weak signals in the background static is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. It is easier to pass the camel through the eye of the needle than to pick out a weak and wandering signal source.

Car mounted radioes in the old soviet union ranged from r-123 to r-392. Larger sets on the battalion level ranged from the r-107 and r-112 to the r-311. They had miniature portable radioes, model r-126, but these were down on the platoon level. What the keyholers are going to be looking for is more likely r-409, division level signals that sit in dedicated box vans.

Let’s begin with r-126, the true crap backpack radio that replaced halfway durable ww2-era r-105 equipment. It’s only going to be carried by nobodies and the performance was terrible in Afghanistan for simple los signals amongst platoons. They don’t care to pick up r-126 traffic by satellite, nor would anything at that level even matter. The r-126 is already pretty well replaced by r-158, but it wasn’t deployed in the 80’s. If they intercepted r-107 signals from the different battery-sized levels, which operates no higher than 15 MHz FM, then they’d done something truly amazing. If they were snooping r-123, company level operating 21-50 MHz FM then they probably heard Igor talking to Schestev about his girlfriend Nadia and nothing to do with anything important. (Remember, the soviets manuevered at minimally the battalion level, so sub-battalion communications really are not very attractive to record.)

The r-112 traffic, 2.8 MHz to just under 5 MHz AM, could be intercepted by satellite, but it was much easier via aircraft because this signal at full power travels very, very well under the ozone. Now, r-311 traffic was more interesting, because you got insight into fire-control commanders and some of the real button pushers below the regiment-level, which may be very productive to know. But we aren’t talking small car-mounted communications here, we’re talking dedicated generators in the 2kW range. (Now remember, r-311 was one-way traffic, **** flowing downhill from the top.) This traffic is operating up to 15 MHz AM and is often continuous wave to prevent jamming. From there you have division and regimental level stuff, again not small enough to fit into cars. These are what your satellites are truly going to pan over. Not car radioes.

And the fact that eludes these far fetched claims. Ferret satellites at most are sixteen at one time. This was 1991, pre-Gulf War. Ferrets are usually your ellipticals, using stretched curves to suspend over their target in order to maintain extra time overhead. Some have been put into geosynched orbit but they aren’t really the best solution in that role. Ferrets are cheaper than big birds and are not nearly as sensitive. Every 90 minutes to four hours we had a new ferret flying overhead Iraq. Sometimes as many as three would converge at any one time when the orbits were just right. It was pretty cool, every couple of hours a new map could be printed over just about every Iraqi unit, which in modern combat is pretty damn close to real time even today.

The keyholers, what people here affectionately called big birds, are your geosynchronous monster satellites that nations fear. Those are your sharp ears out there, not ferrets. And they are so far out that they require massive amounts of fuel during their lifetime. Without manuever they’d be pointless. So basically these super satellites, that cost on the scale of aircraft carriers, are going to be the ones that can detect the least powerful terrestrial signals. I highly doubt they are going to waste time snooping car-mounted radio conversations with these unless they knew ahead of time what they wanted to hear. Its just cost-prohibitive to use these kinds of tools for menial scans.

Ever hear of the atmosphere? Hand held radio frequency is a very broad statement. The only handheld communications equipment that normally penetrates the atmosphere does it by strict design. And doing so is very power hungry. If you believe they can discriminate and key in on a specific yet common frequency and amplitudal electromagnetic source from space then you’ve been spending to much time fighting ditch weed fires.

hype. The radio signals don’t propogate that far into space.

300/year = 25/month

I don’t remember anything since the 50’s with production rates anywhere near that. What aircraft was produced at that rate in the past fifty years? Or perhaps I misread your number and the 300/year really was meant as a sum for all fighters – not one particular family – being produced per year?

Boyd’s principles also apply to the AAM. The reason Boyd proposed guns was because of the relative ineffectiveness of missile technology in his day. With no real sustained thrust the missiles of his day needed a very small launch window to be successful. But the missiles coming online in the immediate future address these problems, making the fighter aircraft’s true performance perhaps less important.

Ever play ‘Raid on Bungeling Bay’?