It’s the enormous gain of the 300ft+ dish antennas that fold out similar to an umbrella.
They stay exactly on station and several of them give you coverage of the entire earth...plus there are spares.
23,000 miles is NOTHING when you have that much DB gain.
It’s as though they have a nice quality receiver in every square yard on the earth with a whip antenna for reception.
Now just imagine what you could listen to AND transmit to?
And simple talking and listening is only a fraction of the workload of these sats.
You could for instance add microwatt level rf i/o to any innocuous looking IC chip and send/receive data from it.
Cameras placed in ordinary everyday objects draining so little power they can operate for years....be made to look like tiny rocks and scattered all over the place. They could wake up a fraction of a second every 20-30 seconds and if nothing is happening shut down to an unbelievably lo power drain to conserve battery life....leaving only a timer and motion detector operating.
Sophisticated weaponry would be assumed to be watched over by these sats to track location. i.e. If it is in the wrong location and someone tries to use it it will refuse to function.
There is almost certainly a contingency to spin one of the sats around and point to out at space to act as an emergency platform for the deep Space Communications system. i’e’ You could easily control the rover and orbiters at Mars with one of these.
Of Course, this is ALL just speculation based on open-sources of information.
Thank you for your speculation!
Do you think there is talk of EMP attacks by countries like Iran and North Korea because only an EMP could take out the massive surveillance systems put in place by intelligence agencies all over the world? It would be the only way to have them stop watching every thing everybody does.
Maybe Trump should have set off a small EMP over the White House before his remodeling project, just to be safe. It might be difficult to make sure you got rid of everything.
Well, that was a miss. I thought we were talking about geospatial.
SIGINT is constellations of satellites which use all kinds of tricks. They could be listening to anything including other satellites.
Mu guess is your expectations would exceed the ability of a conventional receiver to demodulate tiny signals from deep in the noise, regardless of gain.