Re: Louisiana Bankers Set to Go Wireless

["Dennis Henderson" <hendomatic () gmail com>]

On 7/9/07, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu <Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu> wrote:
> On Sun, 08 Jul 2007 07:48:38 EDT, Larry Seltzer said:
>
> > Following up on my own point, Wikipedia says (and we all know everything
> > in Wikipedia has been vetted by the best experts and has to be true)
> > that microwave transmission is point-to-point, so you'd need to stick
> > your tower - I mean Pringles can - in the way. I'm not saying that
> > nosing in on this communication is impossible, but it looks hard to me,
> > and probably expensive.
>
> The trick is to realize that it's not *perfectly* point-to-point - the
> beam shape isn't a cylinder, but a very narrow cone.  The end result is
> that by the time it's taken a 15 or 20 mile trip tower-to-tower, there's
> probably some signal down at the base of the tower too.  Also, the
> physical
> security of those things usually sucks, so if you wanted to climb halfway
> up the tower with your dish, you probably could.  Remember, those relay
> towers are usually in the middle of nowhere, so it'll take a good 15-20
> minutes for cops to show up - plenty of time to sniff lots of interesting
> data...
>
> Also note that a large chunk of the signal goes right *past* the target
> tower
> and follows a line-of-sight off into space - the NRO took advantage of
> that
> when it would station listening satellites out where the beam ended up.
> (And
> yes, few of the beams conveniently intersected a stable geosync orbit, so
> they'd fly an orbit that intersected as many beams of interest for as long
> as they could, getting a few minutes of each one.


Not to mention sidelobes present in all "directional" transmissions.

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