7

                            Communications

                          The Information War


Ten years ago a brash sailor named Ted Turner from Atlanta took a bankrupt television station and turned it into the money-making Turner Broadcasting System (TBS). It includes the Cable News Network and Headline News (CNN), the TBS Movie Network, and two radio networks -- in all, a force to be reckoned with. The traditional networks just wish that Turner hadn't found that bankrupt station. He has rained down signals that ruined their day.
  CNN has become the first global video wire service. It knows the advantage of staying on the cutting edge with the latest communications equipment. In the Gulf War, a CNN reporter was able to transmit from Baghdad direct to its own satellite transponder from an attachÇ case containing a small satellite dish and transmitter, while more senior news network reporters were still looking for phone booths.
  The world Turner saw had no national boundaries. Now CNN sweeps into any country, including Canada, without strong resistance. More people are believed to watch CNN in Canada via private satellite dish than watch CBC Newsworld. CNN goes into fifty-five million cable-linked U.S. homes and accounts for 27 percent of all TV news watching. However, CNN is also hard-wired into ten million homes outside the United States, along with 250,000 hotels, embassies, businesses, and stock exchanges. It gathers and repackages news from over 120 countries and relays it into about 100 countries. It's about the only thing that George Bush, Fidel Castro, Lech Walesa, King Hussein, and Saddam Hussein have in common. They all watch it.
  Why is CNN now the very profitable ruler of global news gathering? Turner arrived at the mind-shattering conclusion, apparently before others had thought about it, that if he received 150 checks in payment for the same news show, he was better off than if he just did what others were doing and collected one check. Since Turner's organization houses radio and television networks, the same words are frequently used for both television and radio, eliminating duplication in gathering, editing, and dispensing the news in several media simultaneously.
  That was Battle One in the Info War. Battle Two is the high-definition struggle for new equipment, transmission techniques, and, most importantly, viewers. After watching this quiet build-up for well over ten years, I think that the Japanese High Definition Television (HDTV) system will win the equipment confrontation, regardless of what the U.S. government attempts to do within its previously defensible borders. The same applies to Canada.
  Japan always has the option of acquiring, leasing, or buying a satellite (or a couple of transponders on a satellite) that could blanket North America, thus setting up its own "American" network. You may have noticed that's what Japanese companies have done with their cars and electronic products. I am sure there are countries currently holding unused "rights" to North American satellite slots that would be open to suggestion. Even a satellite now turned to South America could be rotated to broadcast north. When everyone else turns to pay TV, the Japanese might come on strong with all-advertiser-supported television. They do control close to 40 percent of all U.S. movie and TV production.
  In transmission techniques the clash is more equal. At the moment satellite transmission has the edge, with the fiber-optic Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) expected to be at least an equal power by the end of the decade.
  It's the battle for viewers that brings in the Death Stars, satellites so powerful they could put cable companies out of the game and knock down all existing over-air and cable traditional networks and local private and independent TV stations. The shake-up in the advertising world will leave chaos as money streams become blocked, closed, and diverted. What will cause all this disruption? Sky Cable, the largest consortium of all, plans to push 108 channels out of the heavens within two years. All will be high-quality signals directed to small home (or office) dishes. Sky Cable and whatever other direct broadcasting satellite companies try to elbow into the game will all have to offer HDTV to capture a slice of the new pie. Once viewers see HDTV, their old TV sets will become the latest landfill problem.
  Not only television can come via these new satellites. You might answer the phone via the TV set; handle banking, shopping, and stock-market manipulations; or read newspapers or magazines via the same route. Fiber-optic networks can match and, in many ways, outperform even the new satellites under some conditions. However, the new Death Star (so nicknamed by fearful cable operators) will likely be locking up customers well before fiber-optic network sales representatives arrive in your neighborhood.
  And what about Ted Turner and CNN? He'll be there in one reincarnation or another. No one in the business has his foresight, his daring, or his entrepreneurial ability to change direction.


                            The Electronic Highway


After World War II, when Germany and then Japan shot ahead in technological skills, remember the remark that those countries "lost the war and won the future"? Now it looks as if the former East Germany will be the first to have the new "electronic highway," or ISDN, delivered directly to home television screens.
  Just as some Third World companies leap-frogged some industrialized countries during the past decade, the five eastern states that rejoined the integrated Germany after the collapse of Soviet communism will be first in some aspects of telecommunications. Why? Because they have no status quo to defend, no locked-into-the-past management, no rigid unionized contracts. Their internal communications system, antique by our standards, just doesn't work in today's world. It is far easier to replace the system with a totally new network than to repair it. So this part of Germany will be putting in the newest network, well ahead of the rest of the world. That's the broadband ISDN, a fiber-optic cable network that allows vast amounts of television, facsimile, data, phone, radio, and future broadband multimedia and other communications to travel to any destination the cable takes it. It will also allow computer-based video processing and access to worldwide data banks.
  The German version is called FTTH (Fiber to the Home). It is being provided by Telekom Division of the Bundespost, the highly efficient German communications authority. By 1995 the Bundespost hopes to have 1.2 million homes in the former East Germany linked to the system. This is not a market-driven project. The Germans don't even know how much of it will be used. What they do know is that it will be cheaper to lay fiber-optic cable than to try to fix or replace what is there now.
  The project is under way in Leipzig, the first test area. The city has a well-educated population that is under-employed. FTTH will provide excellent operational experience and offer participating companies the opportunity to acquire valuable know-how for later transfer of FTTH technology to other areas of the world. Once North America gets around to using ISDN, don't be surprised to find German companies bidding on Canadian or U.S. installations.


                                 Group 4 Faxes


Most fax machines today transmit at a speed of 9600 baud (one of several electronic transmission speeds). A speed of 9600 baud is equivalent to about a page a minute for Group 3 fax machines. Fax machines have been around since the 1950s, but only in the past decade have they been put into use in large numbers with the arrival of Japanese-made low-cost and high-efficiency units.
  Prepare for a faster world. Group 4 transmits at two pages per minute, minimum, up to twenty pages a minute eventually. Group 4 will be the common category with a higher transmission speed for the new fax you will have to purchase once ISDN replaces the current global phone/fax/telegram/telex/cable/TV system. ISDN will enable you to have hundreds of television channels, thousands of radio channels, many electronic magazines and newspapers, and hundreds of business and special service channels. All these will come direct to your home educational/informational/entertainment center. One of these channels will be for the fax service that will travel on these new 56 or 64 kilobits per second lines. At the moment several large users, such as Kodak, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, and the ad agency Young & Rubicam are conducting major tests. John Seazholtz, chairman of the ISDN Executive Committee, says ISDN is "a technology whose time has come."
  ISDN will enable subscribers to participate in a video conference across the world at a cost of the phone call plus a slight premium. Northern Telecom, a Canadian company jumping into this rapidly moving field, is making dial-up video conferencing available to its fifty thousand employees at Northern Telecom and its research and development arm, Bell-Northern Research. This will allow anyone in either company to call up others on System 4000, Northern Telecom's worldwide network. System 4000 is currently being installed at sites in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia. With it, Northern Telecom's transmission costs have been lowered to $30 per hour from $400 per hour with the previous system. Sending a Group 4 fax via ISDN is eight times faster than at present. If you are working for the post office, plan for an early retirement.


                              The Fax Box


Although the principle of the facsimile machine has been around for almost a hundred years and available for almost fifty, it was not until the Japanese reduced the cost and size that the concept went global. Almost overnight, the fax machine became an essential part of business operations around the world.
  The type I've been using isn't a fax machine in the usual sense. It is a gray box which, plugged into my Macintosh computer, distinguishes an incoming fax from a call coming from a voice line or from a computer sending E-mail. This fax box also routes calls to its own answering machine when no one is in the office.
  The main advantage, apart from a much lower price than the three machines it replaces, is that the fax box uses the higher brain capacity of its attached computer to do all the work done by the expensive (but duplicated, if you have a computer) components in a conventional fax machine. The fax box directs signals from incoming faxes to the computer, which records and stores the information until retrieved. The fax can be read on the computer screen, diverted for permanent storage, printed out, or tossed in the trash -- all with a mere click of the mouse (or with your voice, if a Voicewriter II unit is attached).
  For outgoing faxes the same system applies in reverse. The fax is prepared on the screen, with pictures if required, then zapped around the world in single or multiple copies at the time designated (for example, after midnight during lowest phone rates). The computer keeps the record until filed, forwarded, or discarded. The same fax box also incorporates its own voice messaging (answering machine) capability. You can even receive a fax and "bounce" its clone worldwide to anyone, again with a few clicks of the mouse. It's so user-friendly, there will eventually be an internal fax box or fax card inside every computer.
  The dramatic developments coming with the merger of the computer screen and television will soon provide the latest surprise. For two years now my Digi-TV has been instantly digitizing my television signals from stick antennas, dish, and cable connection and throwing them on my computer screen. From there I can "freeze," alter, store, or forward them anywhere in seconds.
  Next year, I will have my computer screen converted to a real time (thirty frames per second), full-color (16.8 million colors), two-way, interactive videophone. Compression Labs Inc. (CLI) of San Jose, California, has succeeded in compressing a mass of data into an area where no technology has gone before. And it will all come over ISDN, the updated fiber-optic phone line. Like the fax box and fax card, this too will eventually fit inside a computer.


                                  Diskfax


Did you buy one of those bulky desktop fax machines? Then switch to the more compact fax box or even smaller fax card? It's almost time to scrap them. In Hong Kong, Diskfax equipment has been approved for use via the telephone system.
  What is Diskfax? The latest method of transferring computer data using ordinary telephone lines. Like the standard fax machine, it eliminates the work of printing and then mailing, at ever-increasing postal rates, information you wish to transfer to another location. Data can be read on a receiving screen ten thousand miles away as clearly as on the dispatching machine screen.
  If anything, the process is even simpler than on standard fax machines. All the controls are inside a box 11 inches long and 6.5 inches wide with what looks like a TV controller on top. That's for dialing. Data, graphics, and software are transferred via telephone lines from one floppy disk, inserted into a Diskfax machine at one end, to another floppy disk in a similar machine elsewhere. What was formerly transmitted at a page per minute now moves in one-twentieth the time, three seconds!
  Diskfax also eliminates the cost and use of modems that, although tremendously improved in the past two years, still can't really be classified as user-friendly. Poor-quality paper copies are no longer a headache. Encryption is also available for the Diskfax, and a detailed log of transmission action as well as delayed sending capability (to take advantage of lower off-hour rates) are standard.
  Diskfax can also cut courier costs: no more shipping across oceans or continents disks or parcels of drawings too big to fit into fax machines. Computer-aided design (CAD) drawings can now be instantly transmitted to any location in the world that has a matching Diskfax machine. The only drawback at the moment is that Diskfax is compatible only with IBM computers (and clones) and the MS-DOS/PC-DOS versions; it has not yet been structured for use with Apple Macintosh computers.


                             Worldwide Phone Rates


Shortly after the start of the twenty-first century, you will be shopping mostly via catalogs and two-way computers. This will prove so profitable to phone companies (or cable companies if they get there first) that local phone service (to buy all those goodies and make personal calls) will be free. It's going to be possible because of the economically important data you leave in the computer each time you shop. Once that is in place worldwide, flat-rate phone service will follow. Why? There will be almost no extra operational cost to make a direct-dial call from New York across the world to New Delhi via satellite than from New York across the river to New Jersey. Worldwide 800 and 900 numbers will follow.
  When Arthur C. Clarke first conceived the idea of geostationary satellites back in 1945, even the word satellite meant something else -- a celestial body such as a moon. Clarke's concept, outlined clearly (incidentally, it was unpatented) in the October 1945 edition of the British publication Wireless World, showed how geostationary satellites would work. Twenty years later the idea was tested by the Soviet Union and led to the more than one thousand geostationary satellites that now orbit our planet.
  A phone call, routed through satellite service, reaches its "uplink" point and is directed via microwave toward one of the geostationary satellites (they appear to be stationary because they are rotating at the same apparent speed that the earth rotates), all hovering at an altitude of 22,300 miles above the equator. A satellite can't be anywhere else and be geostationary. Farther out, its velocity would carry it to outer space. Closer in, earth's gravity would eventually draw the satellite closer to earth and it would burn up upon entering the atmosphere. (There are hundreds of other satellites whizzing around up there, but they are not geostationary; they move in elliptical orbits and have shorter life spans.)
  The trip up to a communications satellite can start anywhere from Arizona to Zanzibar. Once the signal has gone those 22,300 miles up and back down, the terrestrial distance between caller and receiver is almost irrelevant. So distance becomes irrelevant to the actual operating cost as well.
  Some countries will open up their phone companies to such services to keep them in the vanguard of communications innovations. They will develop the system and offer it to the world on a flat-rate, call-anywhere basis. Those that do not offer the same service and join the new global plan will be left behind as technology simultaneously offers small uplink dishes that can tie into such celestial systems independently.
  In many ways the change will be reminiscent of the early days of home satellites, when a host of small private companies and entrepreneurs built up a multimillion-dollar industry making and selling satellite dishes for a few thousand dollars. These dishes achieved 95 percent of what was accomplished by the more sophisticated dishes, owned by the phone companies, that then sold for $500,000.


                            Mobile Satellite Service


Suppose your business partner in Hong Kong has the latest specifications on that new electronic wonder product. The details are too confidential for fax, and it's too complicated and costly to explain over the phone. What to do? Call Low-Earth Orbit Mobile Satellite Service.
  LEO MSS satellites -- twenty-four of them -- will continually circle the globe at an average altitude of 480 miles, arranged in a formation that leaves just seconds between the time one satellite flies out of range of your transceiver and the next unit flies in. (You will almost always be able to contact a LEO satellite, from a vehicle or elsewhere.) You and your Hong Kong colleague have LEO's schedule. She turns on her hand-held ORBCOMM transmitter, weighing under twelve ounces. When LEO comes within range, the computerized hand-held unit zaps up the data (via a simple whip antenna), which is received and held by LEO as the satellite crosses the Pacific at around four thousand miles per hour.
  When LEO passes over your city, the transported data is zapped down to your small hand-held or fixed receiver. LEO MSS is also handling thousands, and eventually perhaps millions, of other data packets. LEO satellites are picking up and dropping off messages all the time. Consider them a sort of celestial Federal Express.
  The company first into this field is Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) of Fairfax, Virginia. Orbital launched its first experimental unit, ORBCOMM-X, from a French rocket that blasted off in 1991 from Kourou, French Guiana. It is orbiting successfully, but an uncorrected glitch has so far prevented the unit from communicating with OSC scientists. The problem will eventually be solved or another unit will be launched. When operating, this will be the first practical, satellite-to-individual commercial use of Very High Frequency (VHF).
  ORBCOMM's hand-held emergency terminal will allow flyers, hunters, explorers, and ordinary travelers to "keep in touch." Costs for expensive search-and-rescue operations should be greatly reduced once those light, hand-held units are in universal distribution. LEO will also be able to monitor moving boxcars, ocean buoys, highway traffic, containers, and hazardous materials; track animals; contact trucks or emergency vehicles; collect and distribute weather data; monitor river levels; watch your cottage in the country; or beam down directions to a friend in a wheelchair. LEO will do all this using less than one megahertz of bandwidth in the broadcast spectrum.
  First to sign a tie-in agreement with ORBCOMM to market the service was the largest power corporation in Venezuela, which provides electricity to more than five million people in Caracas. According to OSC, interest from various Canadian sources is high but there are no firm deals as yet. ORBCOMM has applied for Pioneer Preference Status from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which would, if the FCC's new rules are adopted, provide preferential status for ORBCOMM under the new procedural rules.


                                 Satellite Dishes


The only problem with the newest satellite dish is that it's so small you may lose it. Satellite CD Radio recently conducted its first public demonstration of a digital audio broadcast to be delivered via satellite with CD quality to a consumer antenna. The patch antenna that will be used when the service is up and running will be two inches square, about the size of a business card. The antenna can sit on a window sill or be mounted on an automobile under the paint. These antennas might even end up in caps for joggers and walkers. The antennas will allow reception even when cars are moving at high speed or partially shrouded by trees or similar obstructions, thus eliminating the signal breakup and "multipathing" common to current radio.
  It's the same technology used during the Gulf War. Remember the days when it took sixty-five years from invention to universal distribution, as in the case of the electric motor? Now it takes mere months. Eventually the minidishes should be able to handle 120 channels, but initially the service would probably only offer 30 to 60 channels. Such channels can be allotted for regional or nationwide audiences.
  The new satellite that will be transmitting such fare will be more powerful, using fifty watts of power at 2.3 gigahertz. That's ten times more power than contained in the original television satellites. The FCC only recently announced the allocation of such a frequency. Dolby technology will handle the digital processing.
  "Narrowcasting" a series of programs is much like many of the new special interest magazines in print. The idea is that a satellite will attract those whose numbers, in any one city, are not large enough to warrant a special interest local station. They would only garner an audience large enough to be profitable when people with a specific interest were listening all over a country or continent -- such groups as bird-watchers, dog-lovers, pigeon-breeders, tropical fish fanciers, or electric train aficionados. You tune not by station, frequency, or city, but by format. Listeners also get a constant window on their radio displaying information -- for example, with music, they would get the artist, song, format, and channel.
  Satellite CD Radio says its operational charge for the "owner" of any particular channel would be about $100 per transmission hour. No doubt those who take a twenty-four-hour-a-day, year-round contract would get a substantial discount. Radios able to receive the new frequency (not AM or FM) are not yet built, but Satellite CD Radio expects about one million vehicle and home/office receivers to be manufactured by 1995. Proposals for construction of the new satellite will be issued as soon as the FCC issues the construction permit.
  The next development in satellite dishes? Imagine you're on the beach at Atlantic City. A couple comes by and sits down close to you. The young man has been carrying what looks like a cafeteria serving tray with a handle on it. He sets it down, flicks open an easel-type stand, and turns the unit toward the southern sky. The material on the face of this tray is composed of new solar cell material that is converting sunlight into electrical power. It is also picking up signals from one of the satellites hovering over the equator. One-quarter of the tray lights up with a five-inch television picture!
  No battery. No wall plug. The satellite receiver and solar generator are contained in the same compact unit. Look for it on your electronic store shelf within three years. And yes, you guessed it. It's Japanese.


                                 The Latest Phones


Remember the standard black phone? Now, of course, we have cordless, cellular, and speaker phones, along with answering machine phones, fax-phones, and other multiple units that handle phone, fax, and voice messaging all at once. What's next? Those who want everything can have their own individual "phone company," a unit that does what the phone company does. It's expensive today, but within five years it will be as cheap as the first cellular phones.
  The MagnaPhone, a portable satellite telephone, is the most compact and lightweight single-case Inmarsat-A, Class 1 Satellite Communications (SATCOM) terminal available. It provides telephone, fax, telex, and data communications anywhere in the world. The carrying case travels as airline luggage. It is an automatic and programmable land earth station. It can handle multiple phone support (up to five connectors), and operates with any two-wire touch-tone phone. It's self-testing, and has system status reporting and a voice synthesizer.
  The most compact unit currently available, it is less than two cubic feet, including the antenna, but it weighs forty-seven pounds. Open the case and minutes later you are in operation. I love the directions: "Remove from case, unfold legs, swing umbrella antenna into place. Turn it on, aim [at the satellite]." The antenna is about three feet long when extended for operation.
  The MagnaPhone selects the closest land earth station near the call destination site automatically. It can be programmed to handle thirty user-assigned country codes, provides a four-line by forty character LCD display, speakerphone, handset, and keyboard. Also included are all those things normally expected on a phone: redial, number storage, speed dialing, and external telephone intercom; an attachable thermal printer is also available. The unit permits the use of slow-scan video, computers, modems, remote radio repeaters, encryption, and other devices.
  If you don't need your own earth station but want the latest in phones, Motorola's CT2 is it. This phone weighs only 6.6 ounces, fits into a shirt pocket, can operate for ten continuous hours or one hundred hours standby time on disposable batteries. It is rechargeable with a separate nickel-cadmium battery unit.
  The CT2 designation stands for cordless telephone second generation. It is digital rather than analog, giving superior voice quality, less interference, and better security. It could be the phone you keep for life. Imagine: the same number from womb to tomb, and it will work almost anywhere in the world. With this phone you can give up your fixed, wired phone if you so desire.
  In cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong, CT2 is, in some cases, completely replacing the old-fashioned wired phone. At home or in the office it is a cordless. But the great new feature is that when you roam around town, it still works, providing limited-range wireless communications via telepoints -- industrial robotic relays -- just like a cordless base station. As long as CT2 is within range of one of these repeaters, calls will be relayed into the phone system to anywhere in the world. Singapore already has thirty-five hundred repeaters in place and another fifteen hundred scheduled for installation. Hong Kong will end up with about the same number.
  The Motorola Silverlink 2000 is already available in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Thailand, and Malaysia. Note that North America is no longer first with the latest technology into service. Government red tape and telephone monopolies are holding back communications in a fashion that would make India, the original home of red tape, proud.
  The cost is but a fraction of cellular service. What makes this phone inherently inexpensive is its ability to use Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) infrastructure rather than creating a new, expensive system such as cellular phones have needed. It also uses low-power handsets. It is not meant to replace cellular, except in a limited way. Silverlink 2000 cannot be used in a car while it is moving or in rural areas (as yet) because it does not have the "hand-over" ability that goes with a cellular phone that keeps reconnecting you as you move from cell to cell in the system. But that is also its main cost-saving feature. CT2 is restricted to about the same range from its base repeater station as a present home cordless allows.
  Currently, CT2 does not receive voice calls. You can only make outgoing calls, but it does have the ability to tie in with satellite and other paging services. A small window on the phone displays the calling number; so if you phone that caller right away, he or she will think you are receiving messages via thought waves. The system is that fast. Soon CT2 systems will offer various forms of two-way calling as well.
  Licenses have been granted to four companies in Canada. In the United States, standards are still under debate. Once this system is in place, the reputation of Canadians and other North Americans as the world's most frequent phone callers will jump another notch. Installed telepoint networks provide two, four, or six telephone line capability multiplexed over forty voice channels in one indoor/outdoor cabinet, network control center, and business management/billing system. A business can use such a system as, in effect, its own private phone company by installing its own telepoint stations in appropriate locations.
  Further developments? New infrared built-in transmitters on a phone made by Tek Communications open up another world. This phone offers aspects of both cordless and cellular for a fraction of the cost. The technology is so effective that every car would have one, if our phone companies didn't have monopolies.
  You're driving home. It's raining and cold, and you want to phone home to say you will be late. You see a pay phone by the road. You plug the infrared phone into the cigarette lighter, punch in your home number and your credit card number, and sit back in the comfort and security of your car.
  How does this new phone work? Infrared signals powered by the car battery are relayed to a chip in the pay phone telling it to take an incoming signal from the Tek phone. Your signal is processed in the same manner as if you were standing in the booth, but it bypasses the coin slot. The Tek phone is one of the many better ideas that come along when monopolies fall.
  In Canada, the federal government's obsession with control via the status-quo Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has held the country back -- so much that by the time deregulation hits, Canadians probably won't have the know-how required to manufacture, sell, distribute, and operate the newest equipment. No other country in the world has seen such a leading position in communications deteriorate as rapidly as the national debt has multiplied. Expect a Japanese satellite over Canada in future, offering a deal that Canadian TV viewers and radio listeners won't be able to refuse.
  Finally, new technologies have made possible a phone that listens. Yell "Police" and it will dial them. Murmur your husband's name and there he is. Say "Tax collection" and it disconnects. It's called the Voiceprint phone.
  Voiceprint can dial fifty contacts and record the names of people and companies called, the length of conversation, and the dates of the last hundred phone calls. Say goodbye to conventional directories and card files. To use the phone, say the name of the person or company you want to call. The LED window displays the name and number and Voiceprint dials the number automatically. Touch a single key and emergency numbers are automatically dialed.
  When you program the phone, it analyzes your voice, creates a unique voiceprint of each name programmed into the telephone, and then stores the information. The phone can be programmed in any language.


                            Satellite Stock Quotations


You're standing on a street corner. A young woman opens her purse and pulls out what appears to be the familiar pocket calculator. She punches in some numbers, then whips out a concealed antenna and looks at the result. Has she just figured out her bank balance? Some months ago in Chicago she might have been one of the first with the new Quotrek communications system.
  This is how it works. Back in New York the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ stock exchanges and the CME, CBT, and CEC commodity markets provide a real-time data stream to their west coast computer control center. These familiar stock exchanges are sending out their up-to-the-femtosecond stock and commodity price information. Such data is encoded and processed by high-speed VAX computers and transmitted from a local earth station uplink (pending completion of the fiber-optic link and a teleport on Staten Island). Messages are narrow-beamed to Western Union's Westar IV satellite over the equator. The signal is then wide-beamed down to selected FM radio stations in major cities across North America.
  That was no calculator in the woman's hand. It was a lightweight cordless receiver with programmable memory and forty-character liquid crystal screen. It decodes, processes (at up to thirty thousand bits per second), and displays updates within seconds of the transactions on the exchange floor.
  The unit weighs less than a pound, can monitor seven thousand stocks (a review of the "loop" of all those stocks takes just forty-five seconds), and can give instant review of a personal portfolio along with privacy, flexibility, and convenience. You can even take it to bed. Meanwhile, your local FM station still plays music, with "side-channel" broadcasts to Quotrek units within a thirty to forty mile range of its station. It's another example of various communications devices and systems "marrying" to produce newer, more versatile offspring.