Re: Louisiana Bankers Set to Go Wireless

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

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.

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