(Yicai Global) Dec. 25 -- China Mobile Chengdu Industrial Research Institute recently unveiled the world's first unmanned aerial vehicle-dedicated 5G communication product the Habo 1.

It will be used as an on-board data feed device, Sichuan Daily reported today.

Product leader Chen Shengwei and his team ran an experiment, mounting an ordinary 5G phone on a drone, he said. Relaying a 720 pixel video started to get sluggish as the UAV rose to 200 meters, but with the drone-dedicated 5G product, a 1,080p video still loop-backed smoothly when the drone lofted up to 300 meters.

"In designing this 5G product we sought mainly to solve the problem of a drone's beyond-visual-range flight," Chen explained. A UAV's travel distance is within several kilometers in line-of-sight flight -- the current main flight mode -- whereas the Habo 1 enables small and medium drones to perform beyond-visual-range flight at low cost.

Mass production of the product will start early next year, Chen said.

To conform to small and medium UAVs' load limits, the device's modules were designed to be as light as possible, with the whole unit tipping the scales at a svelte 130 grams.

The mechanism also has the integrated ability to connect to air traffic control. "The communication protocols of drone makers nowadays are proprietary and incompatible, but our module unifies the protocol to the civil aviation management platform," Chen explained. A unified protocol, with the help of a UAV cloud server, can provide flight trajectory services and other functions to air traffic managers.

The 720 pixel (1280×720 px) format is a high-definition TV signal consisting of 720 horizontal lines with an aspect ratio of 16:9. It is usually simply known as widescreen HDTV.

Editor: Ben Armour