Satellite Hacking
By Kumar Gaurav,B.Tech(E.C.E),New Delhi.

In this Guide you will learn about:

* Who can help you learn how to build your own satellite, and get it launched into orbit.
* How to get taken seriously when you ask for help
* Examples of universities where you can learn how to build your own
* Conferences devoted to small and amateur satellites
* Pirate radio and the legal alternatives
* How to become a radio amateur hero
* How to break into satellites (not!)
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For real hackers (as opposed to computer criminals who call themselves hackers), satellite hacking is about building your own, getting them launched, and using them. Furthermore, believe it or not, the world's first communications satellite was built by a group of radio amateurs. They were real hackers in the truest sense of the word.
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*** Who Can Help You
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If you want to build your own space satellite, get it launched, and use it to do fun things, your best bet is to join the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, http://www.amsat.org, a nonprofit worldwide group.
The Amsat people launched their first home-built satellite, OSCAR I, on December 12, 1961. Amazingly enough, it was the first satellite that wasn’t built by the governments of the U.S. or the former Soviet Union (now Russia). Furthermore, it was only four years after the first satellite launch in history (the Soviet Sputnik I), and long before the first commercial satellites. Amsat managed to get it launched by persuading the U.S. Air Force to carry it piggyback into orbit along with the Discover 36 military satellite. OSCAR I was a simple test satellite that broadcasted a message in Morse code of "HI-HI" over the VHF 2 meter band (144.983 MHz). Over five hundred amateurs in 28 countries reported receiving its signals before its orbit decayed and it re-entered the atmosphere on January 1, 1962.
OSCAR III was Amsat’s first true communications satellite. On March 9, 1965, the U.S. Air Force gave Amsat a piggyback launch, this time along with seven military satellites.  OSCAR III relayed voice contacts in the VHF 2 meter band (146 MHz uplink and 144 MHz downlink). OSCAR III's transponder lasted 18 days. During this time, over 1000 amateurs in 22 countries used it to talk with each other.
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Newbie notes: Hz stands for Hertz, meaning cycles per second. VHF stands for Very High Frequency radio waves. VHF frequencies are also often called short wave radio.  Sometimes radio waves are measured by length of the waves, for example 2 meter band instead of by frequency (Hz). Morse code is a means of communicating by simply sending short and long noises: dots and dashes with the dashes represented by a noise three times as long as a dot.  Most famously, the distress signal SOS is represented in Morse code by dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. Seehttp://dict.die.net/morse%20code/ for more details.

*** How to Get Taken Seriously
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You can't just talk the Amsat people into launching a satellite for you. You can't even join a design team unless you can show you are worthy of respect.
First of all, you need to become a hard-core amateur radio operator.  A good start is to get the knowledge you need to pass the licensing tests, and aim for the highest level license available in your country. A good resource for learning how to get your licenses is available at http://www.arrl.org/hamradio.html
Beyond that, to become really hard core, you need a degree in engineering, ideally electrical engineering (EE) or aerospace engineering. To learn more about becoming an EE, see the international organization to which most EEs belong, the IEEE (http://www.ieee.org).  They have student chapters and local groups in almost every nation and major city. If you feel stranded in your EE college program, if you are afraid you might not make it, you probably will be able to get help from a mentor in a local IEEE chapter. Also, local chapters are a great way to make friends.

*** Universities Where You Can Learn How to Build Your Own Satellites
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You can get an idea of which colleges and universities would be best for you by asking Amsat members for recommendations. For example, in the United Kingdom, Amsat members hold their annual meetings at the University of Surrey (http://www.surrey.ac.uk/), where students have built some of the world's most innovative amateur satellites.
Important note for women: some engineering schools are hostile (perhaps unwittingly) to women. If the other students exclude you from study groups, and if the professors are unfriendly, you will find the going to be much harder. Before choosing your school, be sure to talk with some of the professors and any women engineering majors. If there aren't any women in the department, watch out, because there is a reason for this. On the other hand, if you decide to be their only (or first) woman student, you can become a heroine by helping the professors and other students see that women, just like men, can do serious intellectual work.
The University of Arizona (http://www.arizona.edu) has a Planetary Science department that has built instruments for many satellites; its Optical Sciences department has built optical systems for surveillance satellites; and it has departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. That's where I got my master's degree in industrial engineering (which is cross disciplinary with all engineering fields). The opportunities were awesome and the professors did much to encourage women.
Carnegie Mellon (http://www.cmu.edu/) is one of the best universities for women who want engineering degrees, but it lacks satellite design expertise.
One of the most awesome places to get an engineering degree with emphasis on space satellites is the Utah State University, http://www.usu.edu/. Its Space Dynamics Laboratory http://www.sdl.usu.edu/ builds research satellites and components for other ultra-high technology satellites, for example the upcoming giant James Webb space telescope. They hire students! However, you may need a security clearance to work on some of their hardware or software. Also, the culture there is overwhelmingly Mormon, a religion that encourages women to stay home and raise lots and lots of children. Groan.
One final note. Most engineering professors like it when students come to their offices to talk about fun engineering projects instead of complaining about tests and homework. I got lots of free extra education by taking advantage of chats with professors, and reading the books and papers they recommended to me. If you make friends with professors this way, they can help you get an awesome job when you graduate.

***  Conferences Devoted to Small and Amateur Satellites
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You can meet people who share your enthusiasms and learn about the leading edge of technology by going to satellite conferences. Amsat holds meetings and conferences around the world; see its website, http://www.amsat.org, or the websites of the various national chapters, all linked from http://www.amsat-france.org/famsat-inter.htm. Another great one is Utah State University's annual Small Satellite Conference, seehttp://www.smallsat.org/.
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*** Pirate Radio and the Legal Alternatives
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The movie "Pump up the Volume" features a high school boy who alters his short wave radio equipment to broadcast on commercial wavelengths. As the movie ends, he gets soooo busted! You may have encountered some of these radio pirates yourself. They drive around in pickup trucks, park in obscure locations, broadcast briefly, and then move on, hoping to keep one jump ahead of the police.
Pirate radio can appear tempting, like hacking on steroids. However, almost all radio amateurs detest and disrespect radio pirates. They know that it doesn't take genius to steal the commercial airwaves. If you want your friends to hear your broadcasts, tell them to buy radios designed to also receive shortwave transmissions, for these include the frequencies that you, as an amateur, can use for your broadcasts. These radios are cheap and open up a planet's-worth of fun. The wonderful thing about the wavelengths available to amateurs is that they tend to bounce off the ionosphere (the upper, ionized layer of the atmosphere). So when conditions are right, and if your receiver and transmitter are good enough, you can send and receive radio communications worldwide without even relaying through an OSCAR satellite.
Even more fun, show your friends how to get the no-brainer version of the amateur licenses and then you can enjoy radio chat groups together. In the U.S., the no-brainer license is called "Technician Class." All they have to do to get the license is answer 35 multiple choice questions. See http://www.arrl.org/hamradio.html for details.
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*** How to Become a Hero with Amateur Radio
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In New Mexico, if you are a licensed radio amateur, you have the right to disregard zoning laws and protesting neighbors and erect gigantic radio transmission towers at your home.  You may have seen some of these towers where you live, typically you’ll see a modest little home and out behind is a tall skinny metal tower with guy wires and funny trusses and shapes sticking out from it. Or you might have noticed someone on a motorcycle with outrageous antennas swaying in the wind as he or she whizzes by: a mobile amateur radio broadcasting station!
The reason the authorities generally love licensed radio amateurs is because they save lives. When disaster strikes, radio amateurs fire up their electrical generators and provide emergency communications for local rescue teams. They also have ground-based repeaters that enable them to patch their radio transmissions into the Internet and phone system at distant locations outside of the zone of destruction.



*** How to Break into Satellites: Not!
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Unless you have millions of dollars and a team of engineers, you have no hope of taking over commercial or governmental satellites. You may have encountered boasts from hackers that they move satellites around and toy with their transmissions. If so, they were lying.  In reality, communications satellites are too well guarded. They receive their commands through dedicated radio transmission systems, and the antennas these transmissions require are huge and expensive. This is because it is important to focus the satellite control beam tightly, and it takes large antennas to do this.
So unless you build a sufficiently similar system, overpower their satellite control channel link, figure out how to spoof their transmissions, and determine what their proprietary commands must be -- well, it just isn't going to happen.
If someone did put together the power to try such a stunt, they would be more likely to damage a satellite than take it over. Dan Veeneman, speaking at Def Con IV, illustrated the danger by citing a case in which the legitimate operator of the AMSC-1 communications satellite accidentally damaged it "soon after launch by inadvertently overloading one of the on-board amplifiers."
Clearly, if a hacker were to damage a satellite by beaming break-in attempts at it, he or she would wind up with a loooong stay behind bars. And, yes, anyone trying such a stunt would be easy to catch. The power required to attempt a satellite takeover would be easy to detect. (Think NSA radio frequency snooping satellites!)


** Conclusion
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If you want to control space satellites, it is far easier and more fun to build your own than to try to break into other peoples’ satellites. That's what I say!
OK, OK, maybe some of you readers are wondering why you should pay attention to me. Answer: I m doing  hard work to get an engineering degree !!