You don't give any credit to our international ham's for policing their own. I am sure if Brazilian hams knew of a "pirate" on their own soil and were armed with Lat Lon of the station, there would be action taken.

Secondly; all the encryption in the world is not going to protect the satellite from jamming by some miscreant or an accidental source.

Personally when it gets to a point where to operate ham radio requires an RSA key, a digital mode and a VPN, I will lose total interest. There is no experimentation in that. I might as well log into my work e-mail which requires "an RSA key, a digital mode and a VPN". The AMSAT group is reluctant to pay for a launch opportunity let alone fancy authentication infrastructure. For the folks developing "bent pipe transponders" such as PE1RAH, I say press on, and make them as cheap and small as possible.

On Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:54:54 -0400, "RFI-EMI-GUY" Rhyolite@NETTALLY.COM said:

> I think it is less important to worry about technology that can't be 
> hacked and more important to devise a scheme to locate  the source of an 
> interferer be it deliberate or accidental. With a bent pipe transponder 
> scheme, if there are two or more satellites having  overlapping 
> footprint, you can  monitor the downlink of each satellite and derive a  
> time of arrival  fix from each. Do some trig and get a fix on the 
> possible locations. I am sure this is exactly what the DOD is doing to 
> locate these pirates.

That leads logically to the next question -- what are you going to do when you find them? Do you expect International government support to send resources out to the location and shut down the offending station? How much are you (and the rest of the world) willing to pay for this?

Better to lock the front door of the house, than to have to go wandering the rooms, listening for the yahoos that came in the back door and are eating your potato chips up in your kid's bedroom.

As it becomes easier for the general public to get their hands on uplink gear cheaply, and to operate it with virtually zero knowledge of how it actually works -- the front-end of the birds must have a way to discriminate between "authorized" and "unauthorized" users... eventually.

On-orbit infrastructure is too valuable to have it act as a "bent-pipe" in an environment where the uplink/downlink gear is easy to acquire and use.

See previous note on possible uses of encryption technology along with decentralized authentication data... and more importantly, how much we'd be willing to pay for such authentication infrastructure... in our time to set it up, and in real money to have it accessible via the Net to all. Not cheap, but then again -- real security never is.

Nate WY0X -- Nate Duehr nate@natetech.com