prcguy,
thanks for the reply. as you seem to be the knowledge base for this topic i just want to recap to make sure I understand correctly as I am slightly suprised who ever built these sats didnt think of this possibilty when designing them. Now, satellite is an aspect of Ham that im not involved in so please correct me if im getting any of this wrong. Here goes:
all anyone who wants to use a milsat would need to do is mod a $200 alinco radio (which it looks like some one is doing in the pic below.)
plug said radio into a 12volt power supply (car battery)
and plug in a small, easily transported/hidden antenna (as seen in a couple photos below.)
and, based on the techniques used by the FCC in their report of the pirate caught in CT, which has been posted in this forum:
use smart operating technique (ie. make short, vague, transmissions from random locations that are NOT your home, at random and infrequent times. basically, preventing anyone from being able to DF steer to your house) to prevent them from being able to catch even a pirate based inside the US. And, all though they can record your conversation, collect mode and frequency data and place your general location to a given metro area, they could essentially never find you, even in the US, as long as you dont say too much for too long from the same place (ragchew all afternoon from your house with the big antenna in the yard as the CT guy did.)
...all for about $300-400 bucks.
just wondering if this is really the case as i find it somewhat funny AND scary at the same time... and these pics below from UHF-satcom.com appear to show folks, who put mosaic over their face, talking on radios with hand-held single band antennas that are NOT cut for AMSAT birds........
