Something that you generally don’t expect as a North-America-based enthusiast, is to listen in on Russian military communications during their war in Ukraine via WebSDR, or that these communications would be passing through US military satellites that are happy to just broadcast anything. Yet that’s the situation that the Saveitforparts YouTube channel recently described. As it turns out, there is a gaggle of UFOs up there, as the US DoD lovingly calls them.
Between 1979 and 1989 eight FLTSATCOM launches took place, with FLTSATCOM 7 and 8 still operating today. They were later joined by their successor UHF Follow-On (UFO) with 11 launches between 1993 and 2003. All of these operate in the UHF spectrum, with some UFO satellites also covering other bands. Their goal is to provide communication for the military’s forces, with these satellites for the most part acting as simple repeaters. Over time non-military parties learned to use these satellites too, even if it’s technically illegal in many jurisdictions.
As described in the video, if you listen in on WebSDR streams from Ukraine, you can not only find encrypted military comms, but also unencrypted Russian radio traffic. It seems that in lieu of being provided with proper (encrypted) radio systems, Russian forces are using these US military satellites for communication much like how US (and NATO) forces would have. This is reminiscent of how Russian troops were caught using Discord via Starlink for communication, before Russian command shutdown Discord.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.
If it is unsecured (or has such weak security) then yes of course highly motivated actors will exploit it.
I sure hope no legitimate US military comms still go through these ancient satellites. And if they don’t–why haven’t they been decommissioned?
when your enemy makes a mistake, don’t correct them.
I mean… what’s the harm as long as you’re encrypted on the ends? Is it much different than just regular old radio comms. I wonder if the hams have ever bounced a signal off them?
Uplink frequencies seem to be around 292-318mhz and downlink are 244-270mhz according to references I found on Google. Those are outside of the ham bands.
As a group, we hams generally tend to try to stay legal. (There are always outliers, of course)
The Russian military, on the other hand, clearly has no qualms against breaking international law.
They were just copying “The Most Exceptional Nation”(TM).
They’ve put in a work order to decommission them, but so far they can’t find a technician willing to climb the tower ladder to go up to the satellite and turn off the circuit breaker.
Must be a pain to change the flashing hazard light as well.
(But seriously–these are probably too high-flying to be easily de-orbited, but there’s not a hard shut-off of some kind? Not a self-destruct, but wouldn’t it be prudent for a military intelligence satellite to have some kind of fusable link that you can trigger with a signal from ground control and make it permanently and physically unusable, for exactly this kind of scenario? I know people back then thought of such things, it was during the cold war!)
And risk someone else triggering it?
That’s quite the conundrum… On one hand, that’s the most benign action an attacker could take: bricking the satellite. I guess that’s better than the attacker being able to change orbits and possibly crash into other satellites.
It would be an encrypted command, duh. For strategic military infrastructure (and a global military comms network would fall under that definition if anything could) the design work is not done unless there’s a method of effectively scuttling it if it is at risk of falling into unfriendly hands.
This has been a standard practice of warfare since ancient times. Even croplands would be burned if an enemy was approaching; wells poisoned, railways dynamited. If you can’t disable it, it’s a bad design.
Thinking further on it, the fact that it allows random unencrypted transmitters to use it as a relay and it’s still operational decades later without being decommissioned suggests it might have been left online as a honeypot. Who knows
From Red Dwarf, S6E2 Legion (1983)
Rimmer: Step up to red alert!
Kryten: Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.
Look no further I got this
The MILSATs are an open pipe… the encryption is done on the ground. That way it can be easily and frequently updated. The hardware in space is kept simple… service calls in GEOSYNCH orbit is hard. It’s fun to tune in to these birds and lsten to the Brazilian pirates.
No, it’s just cuz they didn’t have the tech at the time.
The UFO constellation’s basically deprecated. They launched replacement satellites for them in the 2000s called MUOS which operate around 375M downlink (these guys are around 280M downlink). Those are basically cellphone towers in the sky in terms of how they operate and they’re much more secured. They also only need a fraction of them.
I’m actually really surprised they’re still on: at this point they’re more of a national security risk than they’re worth, in my opinion.
Both the UFO and MUOS constellations are royal pains-in-the-butt for the science experiment I work on, which operates around 250-1200 MHz in the Antarctic region. They’re by far the dominant interferers.
There’s no security risk, the only way to leak data with one is to transmit to it unencrypted, so don’t do that.
They’re kept active because there is still groundside hardware that uses them. That groundside hardware has up to date encryption, but since it’s easier to add a new piece of software before the DAC stage than it is to install an entire new physical DAC + amp + antenna system, those satellites remain in operation until the last ground system using them is retired. Even FLTSATCOM still has active birds, because a bent pipe is a bent pipe.
No, by “national security risk” I meant by providing a technological system to possible adversaries. Not “other people can hear our stuff.”
I know there’s still groundside hardware that uses them, but there’s no reason those can’t be retired: the MUOS constellation is fully active and is just strictly better. Plus if they wanted to keep the spectrum they could just launch stuff in cheaper orbits for more dynamic stuff. The only real reason is just military inertia.
Low or no value traffic that is monitored by some US AI system.
This is the old listening technique. You provide free communication channel and your enemies are tempted into using it. Ukraine has been allowing Russians to use their mobile networks and China has been supplying cheap terminal devices to the Wests!😅😅😅.
ain’t Russia & US allied anyways now?
Because the United States department of Defense wouldn’t just run a tape recorder tune to the satellites…..
I’m starting to wonder if Gabe quit running his saveitforparts channel, would HaD even exist? (Tic)
What if they’re a honeypot to listen to the russkies’ comms? It may well be. It’s quite improbable that this had flown under the concerned US command’s radar for so long, specially after the “Satélite Bolinha” scandal in Brazil.
They definitely know about it. My instinct is that it’s actually mainly to just “hold claim” to that portion of the frequency spectrum. The idea that it’s useful as a honeypot is a bit silly, though, it gets into the whole “I know that you know that I know that you know…” thing.
Yep. I’m sure this is a feature not a bug. Let the enemy use it then listen in. No need to shut it down unless they start encrypting on their end and even then I’m sure there would be an attempt to break the encryption first.
Says there’s already encrypted Russian traffic being bounced off them.
That is probably already cracked.