Satgen312 Satellite Hindsight No10 by GM4IHJ 18 Mar 95 BID of this msg is SGEN312 Use this BID if you retransmit on packet One subject which has received little public notice is satellite piracy. As far as this author is aware, it started in the early 80s on the Gorizont TV geosat over the Atlantic , which fed Soviet TV to Cuba. At midnight Moscow time each evening Moscow TV shut down . So the satellite was unemployed until next morning. But not for long. Several individuals on either side of the Atlantic had great fun, beaming up their own signals into the still active Gorizont receivers, which then rebroadcast the interlopers on its transmitters. The result was an unofficial club of satellite hackers having ( generally ) innocent fun. Nothing much changed until the arrival of the multi channel Ku band TV geosats in the late 80s. Then quite quickly, some far from innocent types began to realise that all you require is a reasonable TWT transmitter and a moderate dish and you can introduce your own ( usually data ) transmissions into the band edges of the TV channels, whether the TV signal is there or not. Please note however that you must not mistake the legitimate control telemetry channels at the bottom and top ends of the overal sat TV band, for interlopers. They are used by the TV ground station controllers. So here for the unscrupulous was a way to have your own data link. Personal encryption was easily arranged, and unless careful and expensive monitoring was carried out , was almost undetectable. Equally important the source of the illegal transmission was very difficult to find , unless you were prepared to do an airbourne search all over Europe, to locate the transmitter site. Recently amateur radio satellites have been subject to a much less subtle form of piracy with both FM Amsat links to RS14 and Amrad being targetted by Spanish speaking pirates, who appear to be multiplying rapidly on both 2m and 70cm uplinks. In this case the intruders do not know or care that they are interfering with satellites. They are merely concerned to use Amateur radio equipment for illegal communications nets such as Taxi control nets and Tourist Bus links, in countries which have very lax licensing authorities. For the future it is clear that Radio Amateurs must get their governments to pressurise these lax regimes which permit or ignore the illegal use of Amateur radio frequencies. Much less clear however , is what Amateur radio users could do to avoid the activities of the deliberate pirates who are operating on geosats. As yet there have been no reports of their activities on Amateur satellites , but given the present situation it will not take much for them to appear on perhaps, Amsat Phase 3D. 73 de GM4IHJ @ GB7SAN or, gm4ihj@delphi.com