China wants to promote civilian use of its satellite navigation system with the launch of a new chip that can support short messages on smartphones in remote areas.
The built-in chip allows smartphone users to send and receive short messages through the country’s BeiDou navigation satellite system, Yang Changfeng, the system’s chief architect and an academic from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told media in a recent interview.
Yang said China would optimize the use of its satellites and telecommunications facilities to improve the performance of BeiDou, which is now accurate to within one meter.
Chen Zhonggui, chief designer of the BeiDou-3 satellite, said 45 BeiDou satellites are now in use. Chen said the system was accurate to within three to five meters worldwide and within one to three meters in the Asia-Pacific region.
On Wednesday, China North Industries Corporation, China Mobile, China Electronics Technology Group Corp and local mobile phone manufacturers jointly launched a chip that allows mobile phone users to send and receive short messages via BeiDou.
BeiDou’s Yang said this new feature could help protect people in wild areas and deep-sea fishermen. Yang said more and more applications would be introduced to consumers, while driverless vehicles would use BeiDou in the future.
A 22-nanometer high-precision BeiDou positioning vessel was launched in September 2020 and has been mass-produced since last year. The chip, which is small enough to be built into smartphones, can also receive signals from the US GPS, Russia’s Glonass and the European Union’s Galileo systems.
On August 3, the China Satellite Navigation Office unveiled 35 licenses that enable the commercial use of BeiDou’s Radionavigation Satellite Service (RNSS).
In May, the office said in a white paper that China’s satellite navigation industry’s revenue increased 16.3% last year to 469 billion yuan (US$69.5 billion). It said the government wanted to generate revenue from BeiDou and use the revenue for further development.
The office said BeiDou could be used in areas such as telecommunications, power allocation, disaster relief, public safety, transportation, agriculture and aquaculture, hydrological monitoring and meteorological observation, as well as long-range military strikes.
It said the system could be applied along with the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data technologies.
Beijing became aware of the importance of building its own satellite navigation system after seeing the US military significantly increase the accuracy of its weapons with the US Global Positioning System (GPS) during the 1991 Gulf War. China started its own in 1994.
In 1995, then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui gave a speech about Taiwan’s democratization experience at Cornell University in the US. He was criticized by Beijing for trying to separate Taiwan from China. In retaliation, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched four ballistic missiles into Taiwan’s waters in July 1995 and one more in March 1996.
Chinese state media later admitted that only the first missile hit the target, but the following missed their target. They said the US may have disabled the GPS that China was using at the time. The incident prompted China to accelerate the development of its satellite navigation system, namely BeiDou, which means the Big Dipper, the reports said.
On July 31, 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that the installation of the third-generation BeiDou system was completed. On July 31 this year, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), a state-owned company, announced the official launch of BeiDou’s global satellite navigation services.
It is still unclear whether the PLA used the BeiDou system when it launched 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles into Taiwan’s waters on Thursday in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the self-governing island. .
In recent years, Chinese media reported on BeiDou’s military applications.
In a 2018 report, the PLA used a BeiDou smartwatch, which can track the locations and health of its soldiers and allow them to call for help and report live situations. To hide their location, soldiers can destroy the watch by pressing a one-touch button, the report said.
Another article said that BeiDou can be used to guide the LeiShi-6 (LS-6) Thunder Stone slide bomb, which does not require expensive sensors and cameras.
Citing Russia’s military operations in Ukraine this year, the article said the Russian military wasted a large number of missiles because it did not have a high-precision satellite navigation system to guide them.
It said BeiDou could still be used as an additional tool to guide China’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as the Dongfeng-41, although their ultra-high speed could reduce the accuracy of the navigation system.
Zhu Jiangming, a military columnist, wrote in an article published by the Southern People Weekly that some ballistic missiles, including the Dongfeng-21, had to reduce their speed to less than 10 times the speed of sound in order to be guided through BeiDou.
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