Why is China's beidou terminal so expensive?

Aug. 31, 2008 - PRLog -- China  has invested several billion, and each year there is a lot of depreciation. But Beidou is not fully used, causing a big waste. Beidou-1 User capacity is over 1 million, but now it only has about 1000 users. remember that it is not for China defense (visit http://www.challenblog.com) or military use, but mainly for business use, of course as well as disaster rescue.

The main reason why it is not popular as expected is that Beidou-1 terminal is far more expensive than US's GPS terminal. Its price is about 20,000 CNY, while normal GPS only costs several thousand CNY.

I have been curious about why its price is so high. As Qi Faren (Chinese Academy of Engineering) said, the more users, the cheaper the terminal will be.

Today I learn that in February 2008, a chip called "Pilotage No. 1" has been developed by a company in Shanghai. The chip is fully  demestically-manufactured. "Pilotage No. 1" will replace "Beidou" navigation terminal's foreign chips, and lowers the price from about 20,000 CNY to less than 1,000 CNY.

Hope that it is true.

How Beidou-1 works, the following procedure is utilized:

  1. A signal is transmitted skyward by a remote terminal.
  2. Each of the geostationary satellites receive the signal.
  3. Each satellite sends the accurate time of when each received the signal to a ground station.
  4. The ground station calculates the longitude and latitude of the remote terminal, and determines the altitude from a relief map.
  5. The ground station sends the remote terminal's 3D position to the satellites.
  6. The satellites broadcast the calculated position to the remote terminal.

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About: China defense, military, blog articles, I will try to give my ideas and points of view. Could you please leave some comments if you have any opinion or thought?