Photo Gallery Jamming in Tehran
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the unveiling ceremony of new satellite rockets in Tehran on Feb. 3: The Tehran regime has been blocking transmissions of foreign media from Europe's largest television satellite. The United Nations has condemned the jamming attempts, but there is little the international community can do against it.
A computer graphic of Eutelsat's Hot Bird satellites: Tehran has been jamming foreign media transmissions from Hot Bird 8. The Farsi services of the BBC and Voice of America have been affected, as has the Arabic service of the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
This graphic shows Hot Bird 8's coverage area.
An uplink ground station near Munich: To block the signals from Hot Bird 8, the Iranians only need to transmit a strong signal in the direction of the satellite using the same frequency with which programs are transmitted from the original ground transmission station.
Deutsche Welle headquarters in Bonn: "We experienced disruptions in December and February," Deutsche Welle spokesman Johannes Hoffmann told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "A total of over 30 hours of programming was blocked."
Not all the channels on Hot Bird 8 have been affected by the electronic sabotage, however. The state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting also transmits its Press TV foreign service from Hot Bird 8. So far, it has not experienced any problems.
Opposition protests in Tehran in December 2009: Tehran has targeted the satellite in a bid to prevent critical foreign media coverage from reaching viewers in Iran.
