China's BeiDou satellite positioning system goes live

Following on from the American GPS, Russian GloNaSS and the European Galileo satellite positioning systems, the Chinese have now fired up their own constellation called BeiDou which became operational over the last few days of 2018...

Not even three years after its noisy introduction at the 2014 Maker Faire in Rome, the Intel Edison module has been discontinued. The introduction of the Edison was accompanied by the launch of the Galileo 2, intended to replace the already failed Galileo 1. Apparently the second version didn’t do any better. The Joule module hasn’t even celebrated its first birthday and is binned already. Users who rely on one or more of these products can place last time orders (LTOs) until September 16, 2017.

It is bound to happen: a while ago I wrote about the extremely accurate navigation possibilities that the Galileo satellite system will be able to offer. Now it appears that a number of the atomic clocks on board of a few of the satellites have given up the ghost – and that while extremely accurate timing and absolute requirement is for any navigation system...

The Swiss manufacturer u-blox has released new firmware (version 3.01) for its M8 family of GNSS receiver modules, adding support for the European Galileo satellite navigation network. This augments existing support for various satellite navigation systems, including GPS (USA), GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou (China) and QZSS (Japan). The modules can track up to three satellite constellations concurrently.