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I’ve often wondered why no commercial satellite provider provides any kind of RF platform. I believe you could tell which power plants and factories are active

I’ve often wondered why no commercial satellite provider provides any kind of RF platform. I believe you could tell which power plants and factories are active and at what level from the amount of RF emissions. It seems like you could get lots of valuable information without even decoding any of the signals. Does anyone know why this service has never been offered?

parsimo2010 6y ago
What you’re asking about is essentially why hasn’t anyone started a civilian SIGINT/MASINT company. The main reason is cost and governments. Most civilian devices are compliant to some country’s emission standard, and don’t have a lot of spurious emissions outside of their fundamental frequency, and only use the power necessary to complete their function. Detecting these things from space is crazy hard. When your field of view is wide, you have a ton of similar signals stepping on each other. When your field of view is narrow it takes a lot of time to look at everything. Overcoming these basic problems is why the major powers of the world have to spend billions of dollars to do it. And even if you managed to fund and develop a civilian capability, you have to get permission from a major world power to launch and operate. They don’t like competition- this is why civilian space imagery has limited resolution and why Capella has to limit their resolution. Civilian SIGINT would have to be limited to the point where it has no commercial use. If civilian SIGINT were able to measure activity at factories it could measure activity at military bases and track military movements. While it would be cool to have the capability, it won’t happen soon. Not because there aren’t people smart enough to solve the technical problems, but because nobody has navigated the political issues. The people with the resources to do so are happy enough with the money they are receiving from the governments of the world.

parsimo2010 6y ago

What you’re asking about is essentially why hasn’t anyone started a civilian SIGINT/MASINT company. The main reason is cost and governments. Most civilian devices are compliant to some country’s emission standard, and don’t have a lot of spurious emissions outside of their fundamental frequency, and only use the power necessary to complete their function. Detecting these things from space is crazy hard. When your field of view is wide, you have a ton of similar signals stepping on each other. When your field of view is narrow it takes a lot of time to look at everything. Overcoming these basic problems is why the major powers of the world have to spend billions of dollars to do it. And even if you managed to fund and develop a civilian capability, you have to get permission from a major world power to launch and operate. They don’t like competition- this is why civilian space imagery has limited resolution and why Capella has to limit their resolution. Civilian SIGINT would have to be limited to the point where it has no commercial use. If civilian SIGINT were able to measure activity at factories it could measure activity at military bases and track military movements. While it would be cool to have the capability, it won’t happen soon. Not because there aren’t people smart enough to solve the technical problems, but because nobody has navigated the political issues. The people with the resources to do so are happy enough with the money they are receiving from the governments of the world.