Illegal Starlink terminals from the American company SpaceX are contributing to Russia’s advance on the battlefield in Ukraine, particularly during the seizure of Vuhledar, Donetsk Oblast.
In the conflict area you could ban all terminals that are not tied to Ukraine. Not worldwide. As satellites enter conflict area they will receive traffic from new terminals, check are these terminals registered to the good guys and turn off all others.
I think that’s what they were trying to do with the GPS tracking, and why the Russians started spoofing the GPS location. So the illegal terminal would think it’s in Poland or some other part of the EU rather than being in the conflict area.
I wonder though if GPS is the end here though. The actual signal from the terminal to the Starlink satellites itself - that can probably be triangulated. Perhaps with less accuracy than GPS but … so do all the things you said, plus: if the triangulated signal somehow doesn’t match the GPS coordinates by too big a difference, shut the terminal down.
There still remains the case of Russian military units killing a Ukraine unit and stealing the terminal before they have a chance to deactivate it. However, first eventually HQ will realize that the unit is unaccounted for and cancel it so it only has a limited window to be used, and second it would cost the Russians quite a bit in human life to acquire terminals in this manner, hopefully high enough that they won’t be willing to pay it at all.
In the conflict area you could ban all terminals that are not tied to Ukraine. Not worldwide. As satellites enter conflict area they will receive traffic from new terminals, check are these terminals registered to the good guys and turn off all others.
I think that’s what they were trying to do with the GPS tracking, and why the Russians started spoofing the GPS location. So the illegal terminal would think it’s in Poland or some other part of the EU rather than being in the conflict area.
I wonder though if GPS is the end here though. The actual signal from the terminal to the Starlink satellites itself - that can probably be triangulated. Perhaps with less accuracy than GPS but … so do all the things you said, plus: if the triangulated signal somehow doesn’t match the GPS coordinates by too big a difference, shut the terminal down.
There still remains the case of Russian military units killing a Ukraine unit and stealing the terminal before they have a chance to deactivate it. However, first eventually HQ will realize that the unit is unaccounted for and cancel it so it only has a limited window to be used, and second it would cost the Russians quite a bit in human life to acquire terminals in this manner, hopefully high enough that they won’t be willing to pay it at all.