Hacking Iridium Satellites With Iridium Toolkit

Over on YouTube TechMinds has uploaded a video showing how to use the Iridium Toolkit software to receive data and audio from Iridium satellites with an Airspy. Iridium is a global satellite service that provides various services such as global paging, satellite phones, tracking and fleet management services, as well as services for emergency, aircraft, maritime and covert operations too. It consists of multiple low earth orbit satellites where there is at least one visible in the sky at any point in time, at most locations on the Earth.

The frequencies used by the older generation Iridium satellites are in the L-band, and the data is completely unencrypted. That allows anyone with an RTL-SDR or other SDR radio to decode the data with the open source Iridium Toolkit. If you're interested in how Iridium Toolkit was developed, see this previous post about Stefan "Sec" Zehl and Schneider's 2016 talk.

In the video Tech Minds shows decoding of various data, including an audio call and the satellite tracks and heat map of Iridium satellites.

Hacking Iridium Satellites With Iridium Toolkit

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RF Guy

or a plug-in for sdr#, like the scytale-c.

ditty

Wish someone could compile a windows version

Zenon

Linux isn’t so hard. I’m using it from 3 years and don’t remember any command but with tutorials I can achieve objectives. Good luck.

iTrooper

I still agree, a Windows version is definitely needed. I don’t mind Linux, but it’s a time consuming hassle to setup and entire OS (Virtual or Real) to play with one app.

Ding

Or you can decide to stop whining like a little ***** and use Linux.