OK in the books their are comm jammers to stop transmissions

And their are comm scramblers to stop people intercepting the transmissions

But what do I use if I want to intercept an enemy transmission

Do I just use a com link or some other com device?

Or do I use a slicer or data breaker? Surely i can intercept wirelessly

Do I need different equipment for intercepting holonet?

It depends. At a minimum you need a comlink to intercept, if they use a scrambler the to "have the right tools" slicer gear and/or data breaker are probably also required to break the encryption.

Holonet is typically considered its own thing, so to crack that you'll need a holonet transceiver, and then you can talk slicer gear.

In terms of comlinks and radios, you need to do a couple of things.

Find the frequency they're using, so you sweep through the active signals with a spectrum scanner until you find the right one.

(Or- you steal a radio they're using and then use that, though it runs the risk they know its missing and change their freq+ crypt)

Record the transmission onto some sort of data storage

Find what kind of encryption they're using, duplicate that and load it into your reciever so you can listen in.

Of course, if they're using a fairly complicated encryption, then it will be accordingly more difficult

Holonet is considerably more problematic.

You need a holonet reciever, which is expensive, rare and highly restricted in the age of the Empire

Then, you need to figure out 'who' they are going to be sending their transmission to, because the system is effectively point to point.

Once you've got the gear, figured out who is sending what/where (astrogation) you need to literally cast a net so to speak to capture and record the S-packets that are going through that part of space.

Or

They could be sending it off to the nearest holonet relay.

Finding a relay is super top-secret stuff, plus you'd like to think they're just a satellite sitting out in the middle of nowhere... except that they arent!

No sir, they're a satellite sitting out in the middle of nowhere which is in hyperspace (objects in hyperspace remain there until their engine drops them back out)

From time to time they get maintained by people/droids that send a signal to the unit, drops it out of hyperspace and then do what they need to do, them put it back in the hyperspace dimension. If you can get hold of that sort of super-secret data, then you stand a good chance of netting massive amounts of traffic by simply diverting the data off of the relay and into your own reciever.

Then, sit back and spend quite some time picking through it and decrypting what is essentially top secret, secure information.

The Codebreaker talent from Slicer career makes them better than most others at doing this, but its never easy, if it was easy then the information is obviously not that important.

Sounds like accessing the spynet is easier than accessing the holonet.

Sounds like accessing the spynet is easier than accessing the holonet.

And that's exactly how the Empire likes it.

Sounds like accessing the spynet is easier than accessing the holonet.

Kind of think of the holonet as a proper, heavily redundant, staggeringly expensive and encrypted military network.

Sort of what the internet would be if there was no civilian access and then let them fill it with cat pictures, email spam and porn.