An American intelligence assessment found that the balloon used a commercially available U.S. network to communicate, primarily for navigation, U.S. officials say.
Why would they need data then? With GPS can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it’s way smaller. And no need for any carrier or subscription.
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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.
Why would they need data then? With GPS can get a 1metre accurate chip for like 20 bucks and it’s way smaller. And no need for any carrier or subscription.
Mapping out network topology? Who knows.
Whatever the collected data was, it could have been sent to their satellites for long haul back home.