Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!ctrsol!cica!iuvax!mailrus!ames!amdahl!amdcad!military
From: smb@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Steven M. Bellovin)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: DFing, was The death of mobile war
Message-ID: <26826@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 18 Aug 89 04:24:45 GMT
References: <26710@amdcad.AMD.COM> <26781@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 18
Approved: military@amdcad.amd.com



From: smb@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Steven M. Bellovin)
In article <26781@amdcad.AMD.COM>, baum@apple.com (Allen Baum) writes:
> Why is it easy to find the FOO? With the advent of satellite transponders,
> and something to compress and squirt a transmission, I would think it would be
> very hard to locate a transmitter. I thought it wasn't very easy to begin
> with- a lot of hunting and turning antennas, etc.

I suspect that a lot depends on how directional the transmission is,
and just how good the compression is; however, Kahn reports an incident
during World War II, wherein 26 direction-finding stations located
a 15-second (compressed) U-boat transmission.  (P. 504 in my hard-cover
copy.)

Use of spread-spectrum techniques might alter that equation a lot, though.

		--Steve Bellovin