An American intelligence assessment found that the balloon used a commercially available U.S. network to communicate, primarily for navigation, U.S. officials say.
I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?
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I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?
Then I remembered Starlink exists.
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It could have even been one of those multi SIM router things that has network redundancy.
The blurb says primarily for navigation.
So it was using the starlink signals like gps signal and therefore they needed to correlate with the carrier to get a rough time sync.
I wonder what timing data is freely available on the starlink acquisition signal.
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Mapping out network topology? Who knows.
Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.