Sat-ND, 21.07.97

• from: owner-sat-nd@tags1.dn.net
• Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 22:43:41 GMT

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Editorial Note

There's some work to be done! Thus, Sat-ND will most probably not be published on a daily basis before Mid-August. In fact, it's quite likely that there will be outages over a span of a week or so. Please accept my apologies for this interruption of service.

LAUNCHES

Not Supercow but Superbird

Superbird-C, the third communications and television satellite for Space Communications Corporation (SCC) of Tokyo, is scheduled for launch Friday night.

The satellite, which was built by Hughes Space and Communications Company in El Segundo, Calif., has a scheduled launch window of 8:54 to 9:34 p.m. EDT Friday July 25 (5:54 p.m. PDT, 12:54 a.m. Saturday July 26, GMT, and 9:54 a.m. Saturday in Tokyo). Superbird-C will be launched onboard an Atlas IIAS launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral Air Station.

SCC is the owner and operator of Superbird-C, an HS 601 body-stabilized spacecraft model. The payload consists of 24 active Ku-band transponders powered by 90-watt, linearised travelling wave tube amplifiers. The satellite has a pair of four-panel solar arrays that will generate 4,500 watts of electrical power. The spacecraft will also have two 216-cm-diameter antennas using Hughes' innovative shaped beam technology, in addition to a steerable spot beam designed and built by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. of Tokyo to increase service where needed.

Superbird-C is the first in the series built by Hughes, but is the third satellite in the SCC fleet. It will join Superbird-A and Superbird-B to provide digital multi-channel broadcasting services and business communications services throughout Japan and the Asia-Pacific region, including Hawaii.

Superbird-C will be stationed at 144 degrees East longitude, and will have a service life of more than 10 years.

SATELLITES

Iridium: one less

Iridium said in a press release it was informed by Motorola that it has lost communications with one of its recently launched IRIDIUM satellites.

The satellite, one of five launched July 9, 1997, was in a parking orbit awaiting its ascent to final mission orbit. If communication isn't established within 120 days, the satellite is programmed to lose power and will be destroyed as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. The other 16 satellites orbiting the Earth continue to function within normal parameters. [By the way, one out of 17 is a failure rate of almost six percent.]

Iridium LLC was advised by Motorola that should loss of the satellite be confirmed, Iridium LLC will not bear the financial risk of loss, nor will it impact the scheduled date for commercial service in September 1998.

Iridium LLC is a Motorola Inc.-backed consortium that plans a US$5-billion, 66-satellite global communication service. Five more satellites are to be launched next month.

M2A gets ground segment

PT MultiMedia Asia has selected a consortium led by Alcatel to supply the ground segment for its MultiMedia Asia (M2A) satellite communications system.

The consortium includes Alcatel, Titan Information Systems (an American satellite equipment manufacturer) and Thomson MultiMedia (a French consumer electronics company). As part of a contract worth US$105 million for the initial phase of the system, the consortium will take responsibility for the entire ground segment of M2A.

M2A is a satellite based telecommunications network which will provide multi-media digital telecommunications services into small fixed antennas directly to end-users in Asia. The M2A satellite, to be manufactured by Space Systems/Loral and Alcatel, is scheduled for launch in early 1999. The target price for a reception terminal is US$650.

In its initial phase, the M2A network will provide services to some 400,000 subscribers in Indonesia. After the initial service roll-out, additional gateway earth stations will be added to provide services to some four million subscribers all over Asia in the final configuration. The system's coverage area includes Indonesia and the rest of ASEAN, Australia, India, China, Korea and Japan.

CHANNELS

Porn Channels I: Arabsat kicks off CFI

Arabsat said on Sunday it had stopped its transmissions of Canal France Internationale (CFI,) saying the channel had aired a "pornographic" film and violated Islamic decency standards despite frequent warnings.

Arabsat, which operates satellite communications for Arab countries including television, telephone and data transmission, is jointly owned by 21 Arab states. The satellite organisation is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The movie broadcast by Canal France Internationale on Saturday afternoon "went over the limits, and we will seek to cancel our contract with them," ArabSat said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

An Arabsat spokesman told Reuters that "as of today [Sunday] we consider the contract between Arabsat and Canal France International (CFI) finished. [...] They transmitted a pornographic film, and it was not the first time." The French channel reportedly said it had intended to broadcast the movie on another satellite.

CFI is a selection of programmes from France's public broadcasters which is (was?) broadcast all over the world.

Porn Channels II: Canadian satellite kicks off kids show

What's going on in the geosynchronous orbit? According to news reports, a Canadian satellite interrupted a kiddie show on WKBD-TV, Detroit, with about 24 seconds from an X-rated movie last Thursday.

The mix-up reportedly occurred somewhere in space as a satellite beamed the cartoon "Bobby's World" to stations including WKBD-TV, and the Canadian company Fifth Dimension transmitted a porn program to its clients. "We're horrified," said Michelle Hunt, vice-president of media relations for Paramount, which owns WKBD. "We obviously deeply regret this occurrence, and are taking appropriate measures to ensure it never happens again."

Well, how can they if it was an evil Canadian satellite that beamed obscene programming directly into U.S. homes (shudder)? There are lots of reports on this incidence, but unfortunately no technical details. However, it's very likely that the mix-up occurred back here on Earth and not in space.

As the term "geostationary satellite" indicates, those knickknacks are stationary relative to the Earth, so it's much more likely that the error occurred either at an uplink or a reception site. These things have happened before, actually. Bored operators who just wanted some, say, diversion during their hard work. Getting increasingly diverted, they pressed the wrong button -- et voilà, the porn channel went out to the public audience.

Sky Five Text to provide C5 teletext

Britain's Independent Television Commission- issued a license to provide a teletext service on Channel 5 to Sky Five Text, a joint venture between British Sky Broadcasting and Channel 5.

The 10-year license was bid for £1.5 million pounds. The ITC said it expected the service will commence no later than June 30 of next year -- obviously, a very generous deadline. Nobody needs almost a year to set up a teletext service.

DIGITAL

Cancom: Idiots to distribute U.S. TV in Canada?

Canadian Satellite Communications Inc. (Cancom) expects any new competitors to follow rules that benefit the entire broadcasting system -- not just skim off easy business, said Paul Racine, Cancom's vice-president of regulatory, corporate and native affairs.

Cancom currently is the only wholesale signal distributor licensed in Canada. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said earlier this week it will hold a hearing next February to consider the renewal of Cancom's licence as a satellite distributor of cable signals to about 2,500 cable companies, indicating it will also consider applications from others wishing to compete with Cancom. Canada's two fledgling direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television companies, StarChoice and ExpressVu, are among those expected to take up with Cancom.

"We're ready to face up to competition," said Racine. "But there must be more to competition than a mad rush by cream-skimming groups to distribute more American signals in Canada." He said competitors must be required to distribute more Canadian than foreign signals. "It's not enough to just distribute American signals, any idiot can do that [...] you must also use some of the revenues you derive from distributing American signals to distribute Canadian signals." Racine also opposes the entry of DTH companies to cable markets: "You can not be cable's worst competitor and cable's best friend." Incidentally, Cancom and its 54-percent owner Western International Communications Inc. hold a 10-percent stake in ExpressVu.

Cancom is more or less an invention of the Canadian government -- at least, it inspired the creation of the company 15 years ago when it wanted to ensure remote Canadian communities got access to television signals.

ONLINE

Zheng: Letter from the funny farm

Okay, it's summertime. There hardly are any interesting news. So I phoned Grandpa Zheng, who fortunately is still detained in a lunatic asylum, begging him to send me some Internet news. Too bad -- he did.

First of all, he wrote that Britain's Queen Elizabeth loves to surf the Internet and has become an ambitious fan of the information superhighway. He claims he read that in the Sunday Times.

Coached by her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, the 71-year-old has become a devotee of cyberspace and reportedly even likes to address her subjects by email! The paper said that Queen Elizabeth, who oversaw her own site's design, scans its public message book with growing fascination. The monarch reportedly is now thought to use the Internet to exchange information on current affairs with highly placed confidantes around Britain and the Commonwealth states.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/

(It was quite an effort to research the URL, according to Zheng: "Just remember that less than a year before the site was set up last February, Reuters reported that gullible Britons woke up on April 1, 1996 to hear that Queen Elizabeth had set up a web site on the Internet. Ha, ha -- April Fools Day! Back then, the Guardian claimed the queen's cyberspace debut included an interactive tour of Buckingham Palace and a quiz about the royal family. So, does reality match that joke? Find out yourself.")

And then there were the Microsoft pigs.

The software giant has created a SwineOnline Web site in conjunction with Microsoft's Site Builders Network State Fair, an online event that was launched last Friday. (You don't have to be a member to access the site.) Get ready for some heavy Active-Xing (if you dare >:-) and other state-of-the-art technology . Yes, sometimes you even need Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Preview II -- for instance, to subscribe to PigTV.

Too bad! Zheng hasn't managed to install that software yet. It just won't work on his PC. Thus, he has to keep on watching "Cow & Chicken" on Cartoon Network because at least pork butts appear there frequently, he remarks.

The SwineOnline thing, however, is about raising and caring for a piglet by feeding and grooming it regularly (almost like that latest Japanese Tamu... Tamagui... Tamaguchi[?] craze, wellyaknowwhaddimeananywaydoya) But here, you can even win Microsoft prize packages at the end of a five-day competition!

State Fair: http://www.sbnstatefair.com/

SwineOnline: http://swineonline.tvisions.com/

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