China Begins Using New Global Positioning Satellites 168
cswilly writes with the news that China's satellite navigation system, called Beidou, has been successfully activated. "With ten satellites now, 16 in 2012, and 35 in 2020, China is making damn sure they are independent of the U.S. military's lock on GPS. According to the article, 'Beidou, or 'Big Dipper,' would cover most parts of the Asia Pacific by next year and then the world by 2020.'" The BBC also has slightly more detailed coverage.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Old news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Active vs passive systems (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I can tell from the Wikipedia article, Beidou is an active system where the "client" sends data to the satellites in orbit. It makes perfect sense for the Chinese though, because now they can track where their users are -- something not possible with the passive US system since the receivers only receive and can't transmit any data back. In short, Big Brother Beidou always knows where you are.
Seems like an active system has a huge disadvantage, though. You can DOS the satellites by pointing an antenna at each satellite and jamming their uplink frequencies, knocking out the whole system for everyone, everywhere. In the US system, you can only jam local terrestrial reception and anybody over the next hill won't be affected.
Better coverage through multiple systems (Score:5, Interesting)
Something I didn't realize until recently is that in the northern latitudes (Canada, northern US), GPS coverage has occasional small gaps in it. My John Deere dealer was saying that in some areas every few days about 6pm (happens to be that time in those areas) GPS coverage drops below 1 meter accuracy levels, and in those areas GPS guidance on farm machines becomes unusable for about an hour or so. As well sometimes a satellite goes offline for maintenance. As agriculture is becoming very reliant on GPS (hence John Deere lobbying in washington against LTE usage of adjacent frequencies), this is a problem. Because of this John Deere now uses GPS and GLONASS together to get better coverage. When Galileo provides coverage, it will use those signals too. The point is, more GPS systems simply improve reliability for everyone, if the Chinese allowed western use of their signals.
Is it possible to combine systems in a receiver? (Score:4, Interesting)
-CF
Re:Better coverage through multiple systems (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
China owns a trillion dollars worth of US debt.
With the dollar dropping by half in value, they've lost 500 billion dollars in purchasing power.
They do this to keep products cheap enough to sell to the US so they population has work and won't get antsy. They build empty cities for similar reasons (well actually I can't comprehend exactly why they build empty cities and empty buildings- it seems goofy).
China being a huge country is not an asset, it's a liability.
They do have a good legal lock on assets- but many of those assets are only rare at the current prices. As soon as rare earth prices go up 50%, millions of tons of rare earth can come on line- including a huge mine in the US.
About the time they stop building empty cities, the demand for copper and other building materials is going to drop through the floor.
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The US leadership class appears to have lost it and descended into greed.
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The true threat to the work is not china or the US but the corporations and the top 1%. And it's almost certainly two decades too late to do anything about it.