Great to see these writeups being made
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A lot of broadcast television is basically local stations taking feeds from satellite downlinks and piping them out on local transmitters. I can't help but wonder if it would be possible to set up an industry-standard IRD (integrated receiver-decoder) to receive the Blockstream satellite data and just pipe it out via a sub-channel on a modern digital terrestrial television transmitter. I don't have as much experience with radio broadcasting but it might be possible there too.
Some benefits of utilizing terrestrial broadcast is that those facilities and signal plants take uptime seriously so there's usually backup power, capacity for redundancy, and tools like automatic failover to backup signal sources.
Imagine citywide radio-nodes. And signals that can more easily cover some rural areas too. 🤔
If anyone ends up reading this and wants to chat about it, hit me up on twitter I suppose
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Here's the Tweet by the author of the blog post that kicks off an interesting Twitter thread:
New blog post: Anatomy of @Blockstream Satellite. Motivated by a GRCon22 CTF challenge, here I look at the details of how Blockstream Satellite's protocol stack works. It's based on DVB-S2, MPE, and some custom UDP multicast packets. https://destevez.net/2022/10/anatomy-of-blockstream-satellite
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