Hacking a Satellite News-Link CNN System. 

@@peterfairlie2296 So the system you have there looks like it’s been monkied with a fair bit, as it’s missing the indoor unit the original RF electronics, and a few other bits and bobs (or it’s a unit that was built after I was laid of). But the NewsLink was the standard unit used by US DoD Public Affairs units around the world for the DVIDS program. The whole point of the program was to link news organizations stateside with forward deployed troops. A lot of it was morale/welfare type stuff, linking the local hometown station with a Soldier or Marine from their area and doing a live interview. Also we did things like the Superbowl coin toss a couple of times, shout-outs during those major events. Also facilitated/transmitted a week of the Colbert Report when he did the week of episodes from Baghdad. That one was particularly amusing because they shot/edited the show in PAL rather than NTSC in order to avoid pumping on the 50Hz lighting in Iraq. It took me on the phone with them to realize what was going on, then they had to scrounge up a PAL->NTSC converter to get the show over to Comedy Central. I also witnessed a system being used to spoil President Obama’s visit/speech from Afghanistan once. The soldiers operating it had the camera pointed at the podium with the great seal of the president on it, and turned on the transmitter without authorization. Everything was unencrypted (since the idea was that things transmitted for it were by definition cleared for public release) and Fox/CNN/CNBC all know the standard frequencies channels. You can imagine that things got interesting when the presidential seal showed up on the Afghanistan channel. Anyhow, just looking at the video, you have the two quick release collars on the elevation rod backwards. They should be bevel end towards the crossbar as this makes fine tuning the elevation much easier. Similarly, make sure your feet are on and you’ve leveled the turntable out, makes your life a lot easier.

Thank you for serving!

@@kamilbro6106 Never wore the uniform myself, I was just the field support civilian that kept all the systems running for 6 years or so, both in country and from home.

How can I get one? I don't think they are listed on ebay...

nfl I seriously want to spend a week of vacation and just sponge off knowledge off the original employee and the YTer running this channel. I find this highly more interesting than just sitting by a pool. Unless the pool comes with a microwave satellite 😅

You seem to be knowledgeable, so may I ask? How did ringback work on the very old rotary phones which did not have tone generators? Was that handled by the phone exchange to which the phone was connected to?

@@subnumeric @kdknyaa They did have tone generators, with the exception that they were generated by large motors driving various devices that could provide fluctuating voltage (sound) to the phone lines. Commonly in suburbs it was a toothed rotor with a stator with pickups like a guitar. To answer your second question the tone generation was and still is handled by the exchanges. It is the job of the called exchange to provide you call progress feedback including ringback and recordings. it's hard to tell today because the sound is transmitted via packets over the internet.

@@subnumeric A mechanical motor was used, the channel The Connections Museum has a video titled “the machine that makes your phone ring” which explains it further

@@peterfairlie2296 Sorry, I was posting to another video and it ended while I was typing. You were the next video in the queue. LOL

A lot of why Starlink is so great is that the satellites are MUCH closer and have multiple ground stations all over the place, so the distance traveled is MUCH lower.

@@SirFrag32 yes, still impressive how specialized technology turned into consumer available (TV dishes are a thing, but starlink dishy is able to transmit)

Starlink is so good because it's funded by your data!😁

@@tibr what isn't nowadays?

Starlink works, yes, but for how long? its literally space trash.

@@peterfairlie2296 Fantastic! Looking forward to it

Yep, in other words...news or propaganda.

Important question

@@Kawka1122 And I notice he hasn't responded to any questions about paying for the service...

"hacking" just like "pirating" in the last video the kit is hella cool and I love to hear experts talk about stuff, but the signposts in the title are just not true

This is only a fraction of its capabilities. Traditionally, rather than an IP bearer (as being used here), you'd be given a timeslot and a CIR (committed information rate) for an ASI bearer to carry an MPEG transport stream. Before even this, you'd get a timeslot and an 7-8Mhz wide bearer on which you could transmit any analog (Q)AM signal, as these satellites are generally just "bent pipes" with some RF matrixes/heterodynes to direct spot beams to down/uplinks.

These particular systems would uplink DVB-S signals (so running MPEG-2 SD) at between 4 and 6Mbps, which provided very good quality video. I actually worked for the manufacturer back in the day, and one of my happy claims ot fame is that systems like this were singlehandedly responsible for the coverage of both wars going from crappy video-phone to broadcast quality.

@@nonenowherebye So they hooked the video phone up to this rig and that is what transmitted the grainy quality live streams of the wars. Cant remember which war they were covering at the time but all I remember is seeing these grainy videos on TV of the troops driving to where they needed to be and all you could see was the land because they had to be careful and not transmit their faces, their location, or anything classified. Curious what these video phones looked like that they used to cover the wars.

@@coondogtheman So on these units, they just hooked up a composite video cable and audio connections. The internal encoder/modulator would digitize and compress the video in realtime, and modulate into a DVB-S transmission. There was also an optional ability to connect via SDI (Serial Digital Interface) which would take uncompressed digital video/audio and in turn compress and encode it. The dish in this video has lost its indoor equipment, which is where the control computer, encoder modulator, and various other pointing electronics were located. It's also got a non-standard transmitter, and is missing the originally equipped clinometer/level meter, and loopback downconverter.

@@peterfairlie2296 Assuming it's all there, you've got an integrated DVB-S modulator, a DVB-S receiver, integrated spectrum analyzer and a 70Mhz->L-Band up/down converter, all controlled by the software application running on the integrated toughbook. Basically it brought running a SNG type system into the realm of not requiring an Engineer to operate, news organizations could send out the talent and the camera person, and the camera person could also operate the satellite uplink. By the same token, I was often training what amounted to the English majors of the military (aka Public Affairs) on how to setup and operate satcom systems. For the most part, once they had the dish dialed in, it was about 3 button presses to get on air. I suspect this was not the DoD version, so didn't have all the bells and whistles (return channel audio, etc...)

*GO "SATCOM" U.S.MIL SAT .. WHERE PEOPLE DO "STUFF"* THIS IS "GEO"

Curious as well... was it found on eBay? How does one get ahold of gear like this? :) You may have covered it before, do you have a VSAT sub/account to use? Are these services just out there or are you using what was already configured on the modems?

​@@peterfairlie2296 Is that legal?

@@peterfairlie2296How does that work?

Think the fact that the OP answers none of these (many) questions about the subject speaks volumes.......

@@peterfairlie2296 Cool.

I am wondering that too!

It has a distinct digital sound, but it's still completely intelligible. Digital HTs typically use much lower bitrates.

It's a vocoder, what is "reliable" about that?

​@@StringerNews1I think it comes down to broad support and decent software implementations.

Nowadays we have codecs like Opus that will give much better voice quality at 24 kbps.

I think it’s free

You basically buy satellite time in terms of frequency, not datarate. For ad-hoc satellite time, renting a 4MHz slot would be about $250/hour. It's not cheap, but it's also not crazy expensive, especially given the capabilities it gave you. A 4Mhz slot was sufficient to transmit back live, broadcast quality SD video. If this is the dish that I think it is, it previously belonged to CTV (Canadian broadcaster) was was the press pool antenna in Kandahar. $250/hr was dirt cheap for uplinking live coverage out of there, especially when the old system used to cost $8000 and took 8 hours to uplink a 60 second story. With this, they could do a live intro/outro and interview between the anchor desk and reporter, and feed out the story package itself.

​@@nonenowherebyeAt 4 MHz, depending on the modulation, you could get more than SD video if you use HEVC. 5 mbps is enough for high quality 720p60 video. Though, you would need at least x265 medium encoding for high quality. And that requires a quite powerful CPU.

@@fungo6631 Yes, that is all true in the modern era. But back in 2006 which is the era where this terminal originates, its encoder/modulator would have been producing DVB-S, with an MPEG2 Transport Stream. So QPSK, with 3/4 FEC, the usual 1.35 rolliff/spacing factor, that leads to around 5-6 Mbps MPEG-2 transport stream. The other thing you have to consider is the encoding delay. These were intended for live, interactive use. The longer it takes to compress the video, the harder the live aspect is. Our MPEG-2 encoder/modulator had a coding delay on the order of about 150ms. Beyond that, when added to the 250ms one-way satellite delay, makes carrying on a reasonably natural conversation very difficult.

@@gorak9000 The NewsLink, which the OP has, was not originally an IP based system. That Newtec modem is something that someone grafted on later. There's a very good chance that I may have been the person who actually built that NewsLink at the factory back in the mid 2000s. When that thing was originally built, it had either a DVB-S or DVB-S2 encoder/modulator, depending on model and when it was built, along with a whole bunch of other satellite finding equipment. That's not being depicted in this video.

Everything connects to the internet at some point in the long journey including the satellite.

Back during Katrina this camera was set up and just running. A bunch of guys, maybe 50 or so was standing around a dozen boats on trailers. This LEO was telling them places to check for people but told them about areas where they may be shot at. He said he didn’t blame them if they did not want to go. The men kind of walked away for a few minutes and walked back carrying rifles and strapping on gun belts. The official kind of looked real puzzled and said OK, let’s go! The there was the Oakland earthquake. I saw a guy completely flattened laying on a stretcher. He was about 3 inches thick. One guys head hung out a car window but his arm was squeezed off and laying on the ground beside the car.

The analog telephones audio signal is converted to Voice over Digital Internet Protocol (VoIP) digital by the Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) A purely analog signal over the satellite would require a lot more of the satellites bandwidth and would have only a slightly lower latency because you would have removed the digital processing time.

i don't think satellite uses ip protocol at all. got nothing to do with that, simply a matter of bandwidth

@@peterfairlie2296 Ok but what are you connecting to then, and who routes that phone number? There must be services for that on the other end, right?

@@peterfairlie2296 Ok, because the numbers were on stickers I assumed that they were the actual numbers of this particular device on the international telephone network, and I could not imagine how that would work without a service at the other end, that may be $1 now but likely would be much more expensive when this was in use. Of course when you have two devices and your own PBX on the other end, you can make calls without any of that.

This basic info really should be in the description... So many questions about it, since anyone who understands things will question it otherwise.

Very cool to see Arsat 2 being used 🍺

Realistically, on the uplink, these dishes could do about 6 to 10 mbps. That's assuming a 40W BUC. On the receive side, well, it was pretty much limited by how much you were willing to spend, and what modem you were using.

@@peterfairlie2296 no wonder why you need so much power and an antenna like that.

I remember the incident, I witnessed it first hand.

@@peterfairlie2296 Yeah that's what I'm referring to, that's crazy to think about too I had no idea haha

@@peterfairlie2296Please elaborate

@@peterfairlie2296 Press x to doubt. Those frequencies are heavily heavily attenuated by atmospheric moisture. Point to point microwave links do not operate in that frequency range. Usually 6-8 GHz. Also the power output you’d get from a microwave style cavity magnetron would annihilate the receiver. Those links use much lower powers as the atmospheric attenuation is almost zero.

@@peterfairlie2296 Retuning a resonant cavity device from 2.4 to 2 GHz isn’t possible. The cavity size required would exceed the volume of the original device significantly.

@@peterfairlie2296 It should be Matamoros area, right across the Texas border, your videos are amazing. Regards from México.

​@@peterfairlie2296It's just VoIP right? in principle, you could add in a more modern system and use that? Im not actually saying you should do it, it would be a lot of trouble I imagine😅

@@peterfairlie2296 yeah, but the whole point of ENG is to get news to the audience. Plenty of VSAT users want to keep their secrets secret, be they business or national security ones. If I was a corporate, political or military spy, I'd see a company run by a narcissistic, mentally unstable man with an illicit drug habit easy pickings for compromise. And if my job was to keep that from happening, I'd happily keep paying more for the lower chance of interception by bad actors.

@@StringerNews1 Interception should not be an issue, you can encrypt your way around that. Availability is a different matter, of course. Maybe some users do not want that man to have his hand on the on/off switch...

@@Rob2 encryption is not a magic spell that vanquishes all enemies when you invoke it. Would you buy a car that's guaranteed to crash, just because it has seatbelts that might save you? For most, that's not good enough.