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"Spread Spectrum and 128 bit encryption would stop this."

No, it wouldn't.

The article gets it wrong. Hezbollah wasn't intercepting channel hopping freqs, decrypting, and then translating from Hebrew to Arabic in real time.

They were doing something far simpler: they were DF'ing the Israelis.

Direction Finding radio transmission techniques have been around for a century. That's right; a century.

You transmit, two different enemy recievers then triangulate your position. Now they know where you were when you made your last broadcast.

If you think about it in civilian radar detector terms, two antennas on a single radar detector will let you know the direction and range of the police radar gun's last transmission (e.g. Valentine 1 units)...with a little computer processing.

With the right software you can have a realtime map of your enemy's movements (well, for each transmission made, at least).

It doesn't matter if your signal is encrypted (for DF purposes). That would just mean that you don't see the mph figure on the police radar, by analogy. And it doesn't matter if your signal is spread spectrum (i.e. channel hopping). Why? Because you are still broadcasting radio energy from your same antenna.

What Israel failed to do in their offensive was to spoof their own Spread Spectrum, encrypted tank transmissions (e.g. with a couple of UAV's in areas away from the actual tank assaults). Simple spoofing would spread out Hezbollah's anti-tank defenses into areas where Israeli tanks were not venturing.

That being said, contrary to the nonsense in the news, Israel did quite well on the battlefield, anyway. Hezbollah is not itching for a repeat of the pounding that they received. Nor is Hamas.

I have no problem with your simple triangulation methodology which as you indicate has been used for a long time. Those preaching the encryption deciphering element of the article forget to realize one has to have the key codes. And with channel hoping one is at a double jeopardy, because they would have to have a computer issueing continues new key combos by a given argorithm, not readily known for starters, and by the time the computer might actually assemble the right key code chances are the channel would change and they never would get a message of any length if at all.
I take such articles with a grain of salt.

Frequency hopping Repeaters and low power xmitters and directional antennas in the field would make direction finding much harder.

Antennas exist which send almost 100% of their RF Radiation straight up (Military already uses these in the HF spectrum). This would allow a secure path (unless the hezbo's used UAV's to grab the signal by intersecting the RF beam). Satellites would have worked well here under the situation that you describe, using these highly directional antennas. ELF would also work as it seems to come from more than one direction, making their tactics useless.

I based my comment on the data within this article. You seem to have more or better intel about what actually happened.

LLS