Prime Base

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Remember that every link is another chance for something to go wrong. Indeed, the more links you have, the easier it is for someone to deliberately render you blind.

True, failure is in the system but, you would have an army of technicians available.

As for deliberate intent. No system is fool proof or survives first contact with a hostile force. Redundancy and simultaneous transmission. Sure, they go a signal; one, five, twenty, and echoes. Then they have to pin it down form all the camouflage and ground clutter. I would rather herd cats.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Yes and no. We have a tendency to assume a certain superiority in our technology that is not always 100% true. SINCGARS is extremely difficult to detect... if you only have a limited time and instruments to catch it. If I have the right tools and the ability to park near a stationary transmitter, I can find it after a relative handful of transmissions. Remember that you are talking about a set of stationary transmitters - concealing the message is pretty easy, concealing their location is not.

You would have to have a system that could scan the entirety of the radio spectrum; then discern nanoseconds of deliberate transmission from radioactivity or solar activity, even stellar activity. The time spacing between the deliberately chopped up radio is also deliberately at different intervals. Far too fast for a human, it takes a computer processor to gather it all, and render it back into a coherent, properly ordered transmission. Note, it is also encrypted too. This way private snuffy can't eavesdrop on the Corps commanders push to Divisions, separate Brigades, and task forces. If you don't have the encryption; you don't have the time (satellite cesium clock regulated), the frequency hop, or the message unlocked to determine if you heard the noise from a star that died a billion years ago or .000000001 of second transmission for "Radio check, over".


This makes radio intercept unlikely in the extreme.