China's FAST Telescope Phase II: 64 Dishes, 200x Resolution and a 2028 Push to Localise Receivers
China plans to ring the world's largest single-dish telescope with 64 dishes of 40 metres each and to replace its last imported receivers by about 2028. The dishes are the easy part, since a Chinese institute already builds them for the Square Kilometre Array. The harder and more valuable goal is the cryogenic front end, which China still buys from abroad.
At the tenth anniversary of its giant radio telescope, China announced two plans, and the second matters more. Jiang Peng, FAST's chief engineer, said the team is planning 64 radio telescopes, each 40 metres across, around the 500-metre dish in Guizhou. He said this would raise its resolution about 200-fold and double its sensitivity. The receiver plan got less attention. The telescope's phased-array receiver and its 19-beam receiver are still imported, Jiang said, and he wants the whole chain, "from the feed, to the RF amplifiers, all the way to the chips", made in China by around 2028, according to CCTV Finance. Read together, the plans describe a state-funded anchor customer for domestic low-noise radio electronics. The astronomy is real. The industrial goal is the part that will last.
The array is the part China already knows how to build. The 54th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group, CETC54, holds the contract to build the dishes for SKA-Mid, the international radio telescope under construction in South Africa. It shipped the first production dish from Shijiazhuang in 2023. Large, precise, steerable reflectors are a Chinese export. The FAST team finished two core array antennas in 2025, fitted them with room-temperature low-noise receivers of its own design and ran joint observations with the main dish, Jiang told state media in January. Steel, panels and motors are not what holds the project up. The receivers are.
FAST's workhorse instrument is a 19-beam L-band receiver that Australia's CSIRO designed and built under contract to China's National Astronomical Observatories. CSIRO designed the feeds and fabricated the low-noise amplifiers in-house, and the whole assembly is cooled to cryogenic temperatures so the amplifiers add as little noise as possible to very faint signals. It has produced most of FAST's headline science: 1,284 pulsars so far, more than every other telescope combined found over the same period. Phased-array feeds, which form dozens of beams electronically, are the next generation of the same technology. Both depend on cryogenic amplifiers and dense RF chips, the component class China has most trouble sourcing at home.
FAST has followed this pattern before. Its positioning system once relied on imported laser total stations that failed during about a third of observing time because of Guizhou's rain and fog. A domestic microwave ranging system went into trial in April. It works in any weather and costs about half as much per unit. In May, FAST began replacing the six steel cables that suspend its 30-tonne feed cabin with Chinese-made cable. Each swap followed the same pattern: FAST found a weak import, and the supplier that replaced it got a public reference that is hard to buy any other way. The receivers are the last and most valuable item on that list.
The array's numbers show why it will need a lot of receivers. FAST's usable aperture at any moment is about 300 metres, and resolution scales with the widest separation between antennas. A 200-fold gain therefore implies baselines of around 60 kilometres. The Guizhou Daily has described dishes spread over about 30 kilometres around the main telescope, which fits. Collecting area explains the sensitivity claim. Sixty-four 40-metre dishes add about 80,000 square metres to FAST's roughly 70,000, doubling the total to more than 150,000 square metres. SKA-Mid, when finished, will have 197 dishes and about 33,000 square metres spread over 150 kilometres. The Chinese array would see the northern sky with about four times SKA-Mid's collecting area and less than half its maximum baseline. Every one of those 64 dishes needs its own receiver chain, which gives domestic suppliers a large and guaranteed order.
One reading is that this is a science project with a nationalist gloss. Imports break, spare parts take months, and a domestic supplier down the road is cheaper and easier to deal with. The laser-station story supports that reading. So does Jiang's own list of science targets: fast radio bursts, gravitational-wave counterparts and the optical partners of pulsars that a single dish cannot pin down.
The observatory's own statements answer the objection. The Phase II announcement said the array would support near-Earth object warning and deep-space satellite communication, "an important strategic support for China's aerospace sector". FAST already reports work on cislunar target detection and pulsar-based timekeeping. A large, sensitive, radio-quiet array in the northern hemisphere tracks faint objects near the Moon as well as it tracks pulsars. The components Jiang wants to localise, phased arrays and low-noise RF chips, are the same ones used in military radar and satellite ground stations. Radio astronomy is one of the few civilian markets that tests them at the very limit of their noise performance. A domestic chip that works on FAST can be sold to China's space programme with a record behind it.
The consequences for Western suppliers are small in revenue and larger in position. CSIRO's receiver work on FAST was one of the more visible pieces of Sino-Australian scientific cooperation, and a Chinese replacement ends that reference sale. The competition in radio astronomy also changes. China is a founding member of the SKA Observatory and builds its dishes, so it has a seat on the leading international project while it builds a rival array with no partners. The United States has nothing comparable under construction: the ngVLA prototype antenna saw first light this year, but the 244-dish array still has no construction funding from the National Science Foundation.
The plan has two near-term tests. We expect a Chinese-built cryogenic multibeam or phased-array receiver to be observing on FAST before the end of 2028, roughly on Jiang's schedule, because the institutes behind it already supply China's radar and space programmes. Funding is the second test. Phase II is still described as "planned" and "advancing", with no published budget. We expect it to appear among the major science-infrastructure projects of the 15th Five-Year Plan within the next year. Any additional 40-metre dishes that appear around Pingtang by 2028 should carry Chinese receivers from the start.