Subtitle: Resistance to counter-jamming built into the nature of the band, not into the number of nodes. Slow. Physical. Hopeless for video.
This is the second post in the series. The first one covered the tooling; this one is about what a VLF channel from orbit can do at all, where its limits are, what it depends on, and what that costs.
A fair warning, so nobody builds false expectations: below there will be plenty of talk about "fundamental" and "unjammable", but precisely as much as justified, and not a bit more. We will stop at the honest boundaries of the idea, including the ones behind which our optimism ends.
Why all modern communication is hostage to architecture
Let us start with what happens to fast communication in the moment things turn bad.
Every modern terminal depends on a chain where breaking one link is enough: a repeater, a cable, a beam, an allocated band, a physical object. That is exactly what an adversary with modern electronic-warfare tools does: it does not have to destroy the network wholesale — one careful strike at the right point is enough. At night, at dawn, at the least convenient moment — and the city goes silent, the continent goes silent, the terminal goes silent.
The familiar counter-measure to this disease is to multiply channels. The concept of a dense constellation, where each terminal works with many vehicles at once and losing one node does not kill the link, is not new: this principle, a network of many independent carriers, was originally developed in the Soviet Union back in the 1970s, and today it underlies systems such as Starlink. When people say "unjammable satellite internet", they mean exactly this.
But look closely at the nature of that survivability. It is architectural. It relies on quantity: while there are many components, the network survives; when the enemy removes a sufficient share, it degrades into weak isolated segments, and each becomes a target again. Survivability here is built on duplication, not on the property of the physical channel itself. Many copies make the network blind to one jammer; the essence does not change.
The watershed: architecture today, physics tomorrow
Why now? Because over recent decades electronic warfare has become cheap and mass-produced: a portable jammer can be worth more than an entire network built as a collection of duplicates. The more duplicates, the higher their running cost, and quantity stops helping — for example when many vehicles all work within the same narrow focused beams. A lot of targets does not save you when all targets are cut from the same yarn.
An idea that rests on the nature of the band
My approach is different: a bet on a band where resilience against suppression is baked in at the physics level, not at the level of quantity. Meaning not "add a thousand more nodes", but "the wave carrier itself is arranged so that jamming it means jamming the medium, not the equipment".
This is the key difference: the jammer targets the channel, not a transceiver. In the first case it fights numbers; in the second it would have to rewrite the law of propagation.
Meet VLF. The key numbers are simple: a few kilohertz at the top, wavelengths in the kilometers range — radio waves comparable in size to the terrain they travel along.
Here physics works in favor of communication:
- the extreme wavelength does not let the wave hide behind relief or below the horizon — the planet guides it, in the waveguide between the conductive Earth and the lower ionosphere, thousands of kilometers with zero repeaters;
- reception does not require line of sight — the wave hugs the surface;
- the receiver already sits inside the signal, because the wave embraces the surface.
The main consequence: to jam a VLF, a jammer does not need to aim at one point. Interference travels in the same waveguide as the useful wave, and to choke the path, one must cover the whole territory with noise at once — a huge footprint, or nothing.
Suppression stalls not because there are many nodes. It stalls because the wave has no single point of application that one jammer can "eat".
Where honesty begins: what the channel still depends on
I will not turn the desirable into the actual and promise "vacuum independence". That would be precisely the kind of marketing promise we criticize today.
The channel does not exist on its own. The wave that feeds it is produced by powerful ground transmitters — of which there are a handful in the world. If those stations are down, nothing is transmitted: the source remains ground infrastructure, and it is just as fragile as any critical point.
What is physically protected from jamming is the receiving side and the wave itself inside the channel path. For the waveguide the concept of "switching off a node" does not hold: there is no "server" to attack, the wave is carried by the medium. Survivability belongs to the receiver and the path, not to the source.
So the lower bound of the estimate is precise: the physics of the channel cannot be bent by jamming, but the source remains a risk area. The advantage is real, direct, but bounded.
The speed, worth stating openly
Now for the thing VLF is traditionally laughed at for, and justifiably.
Speed is bits per second, at best kilobits. For a terminal used to megabits and video, this looks like a mockery from a past millennium. No video. No stream. A page takes hours.
But it is a trade-off, not a hole. On such a speed lives exactly what a catastrophe needs to deliver: a short command, an emergency word, a reserve call. Not a permanent stream, but the one key message that has to arrive when the rest of the communication is already silent.
If you need megabits, this channel is not for you, and I will not argue. If you need the last chance itself — here the math is different.
What would be the use, and in what configuration
If the hypothesis clears the run, the channel takes its place not where the bit is cheap, but where nothing else would be left:
- a short command at the moment when habitual channels go silent;
- a couple of emergency words from a site where a continuous network is no longer guaranteed;
- a reserve thread "to survive", until the infrastructure gets back on its feet.
The common ground: they do not need bandwidth, they need the bare possibility. And that possibility has to fit on a platform of dozens of kilograms — an engineering question which, 40 years ago, would have required a station the size of a house. Today compact high-voltage hardware and dense power electronics make the "funny" solvable.
Status: as it is
Everything said so far is a hypothesis.
There is not a single experiment confirming that such a channel works in the real world. The numbers live in calculations, and calculations may give zero. If the idea turns out infeasible, I will publish an accurate negative result and show why: a story of "does not work" is legitimate physics, no less interesting than "works", if it is reproducible.
Instead of a conclusion
The essence is one formula: to build resilience not by repeating copies, but by the property of the wave itself. This transition, from architecture to physics, is what I consider significant — and even if this project never happens, the question is worth asking: can we build a channel for which "jamming" is poorly defined for a fundamental reason?
If you have a comment about the weakest point of this logic, write it — that is why I publish. At the bottom of the spectrum the community is small, but that way I can claim to know every nick.
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