SHANGHAI, China (Reuters) – China’s self-developed satellite payload test system made its maiden appearance at the eighth China Satellite Navigation Conference (CSNC).
At the 2017 CNSC which opened Tuesday in Shanghai, a satellite payload test system developed by the National University of Defense Technology was displayed. The newly released system marks a landmark progress in the country’s satellite research and development. It broke a technological bottleneck because previous devices were custom-designed only.
The test system can, within a uniform framework of software and hardware, effectively test the signals of all links to the Beidou-3 satellite via the real-time signal generating, receiving and processing software.
“It’s like we can use only a Pad to listen to music, watch videos, play games, surf the Internet, work among a variety of other things. It eliminates the differences of hardware equipment and the upgraded software meets the demand of changes in the test system, saves the cost, and makes it easy for maintenance and upgrading. In this way, the new system helps optimize the specifications and reduce the numbers of hardware equipment, avoiding a lot of equipment by simply changing parameters,” said Wang Lei, a PhD candidate from the National University of Defense Technology based in Changsha, capital of central China’s Hunan Province.
This test system can simulate a multitude of signals of test navigation satellites and base stations on the ground. Currently it has been applied to the satellites developed by the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites.