Re: Analog Hole Bill Would Require Secret Tech No One Can Examine

Joseph2k wrote:
>
> You must have forgot about the "captain midnight" episode. The perpetrator
> even overrode the uplink. Boxes were available in the 1990's but have
> disappeared since.


Of course he wiped out the uplink by using more power than HBO was
using so the capture effect would block the view of HBO's signal. The
only way he could have affected the downlink would have been by being in
orbit near the bird and transmitting at a higher power on the 4 GHz
downlink. His signal wasn't encrypted, just more than 3 dB above the
HBO signal. BTW, he did the illegal uplink just a couple miles from
here, and he has been out of prison for a couple years now. HBO's
immediate defense was to add more power for its uplinks to stop from
happening again, and to monitor every uplinked signal so they could
switch to higher power if it was ever needed. The reason they didn't
just run higher power at all times was that it increased the load on the
bird's rechargeable batteries, and shortened their life. The
transponders of the day were fairly simple. A LO near 2 GHz is mixed
with each received 6 GHz uplink, and fed to a seperate TWT to produce 3
to 20 watts of RF for the downlink at 4 GHz.

He was caught because someone caught the event on a high quality
video tape that allowed the FCC to identify the character generator used
to create the text message he aired. That, along with a list of earth
stations using that model pointed to the one earth station not scheduled
for any traffic at the time pointed to him, since he was on duty doing
routine maintenance on the site at the time. I don't if its the same
site, but there is supposed to be an abandoned earth station in my area
that was the only one built by Microdyne. I have been trying to track
it down to see if I can add the equipment to my collection of oddball
Microdyne microwave equipment. Talk about rare. SN 0001. ;-)


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
.