This would be a fun time to have VSAT IP network bandwidth available over Syria -- there's probably a lot of space capacity since the US pulled out of Iraq (the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were basically the best thing to happen to the satellite networking industry ever).
You can pretty easily get a $1k earth station which can fit in the back of your car and set up in 30 minutes by someone with an 8th grade education and ~4h of training.
How easily can it be tracked with standard bunny-hunting? I imagine the government would locate this pretty quickly and just mortar the neighborhood to remove it.
1) It's a really tight beam. It's gotta to up to geostationary orbit on a 0.5-2W transmitter. Commercial stuff isn't always spread spectrum, though, so it would be easier to go after than some of the better military satcom equipment. OTOH, you can get spread spectrum commercial systems, so if you were specifically setting up the Free Syrian Satcom Network, you'd go for that.
The attacks are basically to hear about it/know about it from human intelligence, then go after that. Or, to drive around and look for the satellite dishes with lots of electronics (relative to TVRO dishes) on the end, and hit those places.
You can go after intermediate frequencies (some of the modems are quite noisy; it's generally L-band on the cable up to the dish), from the ground, by driving around, but that's a low power signal, too.
The normal way is to have the cooperation of the satellite operator, with a spectrum analyzer hooked up at the hub or somewhere (with an IP interface) and then figure out location with tricks from there. (and, you basically "for free" get a pretty thin circle on the earth based on just timing from the satellite; it's unlikely such a circle covers that many rebel cities, so you just concentrate the search there). It's relatively difficult to find a misbehaving (or correctly behaving and unwanted) satellite transmitter WITHOUT the cooperation of the satellite or network operator. I'm fairly confident most of the satellite operators (Gulf Arab states, Europeans, some Asians, and the US) wouldn't cooperate with Assad now. Maybe the Russians would, but just don't use a Russian satellite for this, and pick an orbital position which doesn't have a nearby Russian commercial satellite (I don't think a 1.5 degree away satellite is that helpful for DFing a transmitter on another satellite, but conceivably it would be; if you picked the right position you could force the Russians to use aircraft or military satellites if they wanted to help Syria, which is less deniable)
The US, UK, RU, JP, etc. have SIGINT/ELINT aircraft equivalent to RIVET JOINT (and probably UAVs, now) to do this kind of thing from overhead, but I'm pretty confident Syria doesn't anymore. If they did, they would be extremely high value targets to hit, although likely operated/staffed by the vendor nation (i.e. Russia) personnel, so hitting them might be politically undesirable.
I am pretty sure the sigint/elint capabilities of Syria are focused on FRS, other HT type systems, military radio (i.e. old Soviet anti-US DFing gear), and IP systems (which is really easy when they own the network, although probably harder since I doubt Narus/Boeing ever sold to them, at least directly -- EFF says Blue Coat is the main vendor found, for which someone should be tarred and feathered at the very least). Maybe some over-the-air cellphone attack systems, but mostly they would just rely on the cooperation of the network operator (i.e. themselves), although maybe they want to deal with people using Turkish, Israeli, Jordanian, or Iraqi cell systems in border regions. Basically the kind of gear you can buy for $50-100k. Not the kind of equipment which comes with a free aircraft. (I'm not as familiar with the equipment non-US countries can easily buy for this kind of thing as I should be -- there's stuff like the Shoghi, but it basically falls into the big emitter locators (Designed for finding radars and stuff like that) vs. more intelligence/law enforcement (99% focused on satcom and on L-band portable sat phones).)
2) Even if they could locate your transmitter, you can easily remote the satellite from everything else. I would love to have a $1k satellite system ~500m away which somehow starts to attract enemy aircraft and/or ground assault (either direct or bringing in the light artillery they have left). I'd prepare the likely routes of attack and win all day. The Assad regime and the enemy are on a lot more equal footing now than they were even ~2mo ago, so being able to kill some helicopters at minimal risk to your own forces would be great. You wouldn't even need MANPADs to do it; put a 23mm in the approach path.
You can pretty easily get a $1k earth station which can fit in the back of your car and set up in 30 minutes by someone with an 8th grade education and ~4h of training.