A Chinese company is launching an independent GPS service with a secondary, encrypted signal that can be used (presumably) by the military. There's a couple interesting applications for this — for example, you could spoof the unencrypted GPS and foil guerrillas or enemy fighters while your forces remained correctly geolocated. You could even locally spoof GPS signals to give persistently wrong info about the location of sensitive installations while ensuring that your own people had good location data. Of course, this all goes to pieces if the adversary has a second GPS keyed into a rival system like Galileo or the US system.
In presentations April 23 here at the Toulouse Space Show, these Chinese officials nonetheless said their global Compass/Beidou system would be fully compatible with the U.S. GPS, European Galileo and Russian Glonass global navigation constellations.
Like GPS, Galileo and Glonass, Beidou/Compass would be free of direct user charges but also feature an encrypted signal for authorized users only, presumably including the Chinese military.
Chengqi Ran, vice director of the China Satellite Navigation Project Center, said the secure Beidou/Compass signal would be "a highly reliable signal dedicated to complex situations."
(via /.)
