The University of Texas Hacked Starlink’s Signal So It Can Be Used as a GPS Alternative

Replacing the two dozen satellites that power the Global Positioning System is one of the things that the Starlink network can do. A group of researchers took the long way to leverage Starlink as a gps alternative after the idea was passed on by the company.

Although Starlink's thousands of satellites each maintain a non-geostationary position in low-Earth orbit, they both share a common feature: they beam signals down to the surface of the Earth. navigation devices use signals from multiple gps satellites to triangulate their position on the planet, while Starlink's signals deliver internet.

Todd Humphreys and a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin's Radionavigation Laboratory realized that Starlink could serve as an accurate and reliable backup to the Global Positioning System, but eventually decided that it was not a priority for the company. The UT Austin team didn't need intimate knowledge of what the Starlink satellites were broadcasting, they just needed the signals.

It took Humphreys' team almost two years to turn Starlink into a navigation system. They used a Starlink terminal and service to stream high definition videos of tennis legend Rafael Nadal. The setup was coupled with an antenna that was used to detect the Starlink service's synchronization sequence signals. They didn't try to break the encryption that Starlink uses to keep its services exclusive.

TheGPS system uses an approach that1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 Information about the movement of Starlink's satellites can be combined with information about the source of the signal and how far away that satellite is to calculate the location of a receiver.

Humphreys, who recently shared their team's work on decoding the Starlink signal structure in a non-peer-reviewed article, is not the only one who believes that millimeter accuracy can be achieved with theGPS system.

There is only one catch. Now that everyone knows what they look like, some will be eager to spoof and fake them in order to get away with something. For obvious reasons (they were created as military tools first and foremost) services like gps and GLONASS prioritize security, but as long as SpaceX doesn't want to compete as a navigation service, using Starlink for that could be problematic.