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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-242
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Gaza:
Empire:
Ukraine:
Rare Earth / China:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
@General Factotum #149
I don’t understand how a ‘spark gap transmitter’ can jam digital transmission systems that use advanced DSP capability.
First of all, there are no “digital transmission systems”. Your cell phone, a military radio, a satellite communicating to earth – they use radio signals. These radio signals are not digital, they are radio waves. You can arbitrarily define a sine or square wave signal’s peaks to be a 1 and valleys to be a 0, but the signal itself is not digital[actual definitions are more complex than that]. Any radio based communication device has an array of analog systems starting with the antenna, going to DA/AD (digital to analog, analog to digital), onwards to a number of other possible processing including signal boosting, noise filtering, etc etc.
Now let’s talk about DSP. A DSP is nothing but a digital signal processor – a generic term for some piece of hardware that executes one or more algorithms on incoming signals in order to extract information from a predetermined transmission code set.These might be filters, they might be decoding algorithms, they might be any of a multiplicity of possibilities. Filters are used to remove noise, for example. Decoding algorithms, in the civilian sense, are both ways to jam more information into less transmission and also error correction. etc etc.
Now let’s add another concept: spread spectrum. This is where both transmitters and receivers are tuned to switch frequencies in tandem according to proprietary schedules, so that it is much harder to find the transmission frequency and jam it.
Jamming a signal, from a radio perspective, simply means injecting so much noise into it that the information is lost ie the DSPs can not extract the data from the corrupted signal.
If you look at modern AM (amplitude modulated) or FM (frequency modulated) radios – they arbitrarily define “frequencies” for the different communication channels. For civilian use, these are the AM or FM “stations” you tune into. The gap between different station frequencies (the increments of the dial) is simply an arbitrarily defined range of frequencies, including separation gaps, so that AM or FM stations won’t interfere with each other. Because in reality, whatever frequency you transmit, the signal will be interfered with by a wide range of potential environmental factors.
As a simple example: anyone who listens to the radio while driving, must have noticed how radio stations – both AM and FM – can experience overlaps between 2 stations when going near electrical transmission power lines, or under bridges, that kind of thing. In the former case, the electric field of the transmission lines distort radio signals including frequencies such that 2 stations on normally different frequencies, one gets distorted in frequency to overlap into the other station’s frequency. In the latter case, reflection off the structure is what is causing the frequency changes because reflection off a non-perfectly reflecting surface is another way to distort a signal.
So why do spark gap transmitters work great at jamming devices? It is because it is extremely efficient, power input to power output wise but very poor at “staying on frequency”.
If you are trying to communicate via spark gap tech – the “frequencies” noted above would have to be A LOT wider because of this relative lack of frequency control. Which was fine in the era where there were a literal handful of radio transmitters in any given area; not so fine today.
And the power differential is because you need a whole lot of extra electronic infrastructure to take the very precise oscillations of a crystal and amplify to an output radio signal. For vacuum tubes, it is not as much infrastructure but also not as good frequency control – although much better than spark gaps.
For a spark gap transmitter – you have any of this infrastructure, you just apply more power. And if you’re just trying to jam somebody, the inherent variability of how the spark gap works, trivially enhanced by easily added power variation, means you get essentially turbocharged noise across a pretty wide frequency range.
In comparison: a jamming signal using crystal based tech has to identify the frequency, switch to the frequency, kick start the crystal or the crystal output frequency modification circuits, kick start the amplification circuits, on towards to antenna. Plus you need to inject noise so you need more circuitry for that. Net net, it introduces a lot of inherent speed handicaps to an attacker/jammer.
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 21 2025 13:23 utc | 221
@General Factotum #232
Again, true. But it is a bit like saying a CPU is ‘nothing but a rather large collection of interconnected logic gates, or OFC is nothing but advanced lantern signaling – just a bit faster… How is that special?
It is pretty clear that you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Among other things, I was part of the K5, K6 and K7 AMD processor design teams – so I am intimately familiar with what actually comprises a CPU. A CPU or a DSP are nothing more than logic machines created to execute some specific set of predefined functions in the form of an instruction set. For a CPU, it is an instruction set ie x86. For a DSP, it is a different instruction set – one specifically geared to digital signal processing. Here is an example Texas Instruments DSP manual including the instruction set.
It is sufficient here to note that DSP turned the ‘old’ analogue signal-to-noise paradigm on its head with DSP ability to extract information that is far weaker than the noise in the carrier signal. Care to suggest any analogue system that can do that – even though it is ‘nothing but a digital signal processor’
Do you actually understand how radio signals are generated and processed in order to pass information? It is quite clear you have no fucking idea.
And yes, there are all forms of analog systems that can do what DSPs do – because a DSP is simply a way for dumb digital engineers to work with analog signals ie radio.
The main difference between an analog analysis engine and a DSP, is the DSP works with an instruction set and so has significant reconfigurability capability – but a custom designed analog processing engine is 100s of times faster but is generally not configurable outside of designed parameters.
Analog signal processors are all around you: for sound systems, equalizers, amps and mixers are all analog; Land line telephones that are not explicitly IP based single business systems are analog; radios are analog; televisions prior to relatively recent changes, were analog; Russian military equipment, the older types, are all analog; thermostats, electric motor control systems, etc etc
You can easily refute this observation by providing just one example where reflection, refraction, attenuation etc of an EM signal is altered in frequency.
The example are literally everywhere. While frequency does not change when reflecting off a stationary object to stationary observation point, the same does not hold true if there is relative motion between the two.
An approaching train, its whistle sounds higher than it actually is just as a departing train’s whistle sounds lower.
You are such a dumbfuck as it is only possible to imagine.
The Russian Federation military has demonstrated very effective jamming.
Your utter lack of any grounding in basic electronic or physics principles is not uncommon and therefore understandable, but your seeming belief that you know anything is amazing in its level of idiocy.
The Russians are not “jamming”, for the most part. The backpack and other jamming systems they have attempted to use have been failures. That’s why there are still Ukrainian drones hitting Russian cities, and Russian soldiers on the front have to be wary of incoming Ukrainian drones.
The reasons these backpack systems are not effective is precisely because they are handicapped by trying to use the same crystal-based tech to try and catch up to frequency hopping control signals. It is a fool’s errand.
Traditional ECM consisted of nothing more than broadcasting massively powerful radio waves over all known frequencies to drown out enemy signals. The problem is that this is also very one sided and expensive, and it has the negative effect of also jamming your own communications. The spark gap transmitters do the same thing, but over a much more limited space. They would not be a system to “magically” block just the adversary’s systems while allowing your own – they are a last ditch defense.
As for what has been effective for Russia, is jamming of a different sort: spoofing/blocking GPS signals so that Western GPS dependent munitions don’t work well, or at all in terms of accuracy. This is possible because GPS radio signals are EXTREMELY weak and the protocol is 100% understood. Even if the protocol was not understood, you can still do all sorts of fancy things like time delay or time accelerate the actual GPS signals using retransmitters,
In any case, your uninformed and ignorant attempt to critique what I wrote – is wasting my time. I’m done here with you.
Posted by: c1ue | Oct 22 2025 13:59 utc | 290
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