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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rocket Scientist who wrote (7912)	10/20/1999 3:55:00 PM
From: Geoff Goodfellow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29986

I placed several calls from both Globalstar outposts -- the balcony/deck of their "tented" building and their gathering of engineers next to The Car on the grass/tan bark (that IMHO was strategically placed as a "Fuck You" to Iridium -- you couldn't avoid passing on your way to/from their nearby building). I also placed a call from the Ericsson "building" in the same area. Found lacking: I found call set up times to be on the order 30 seconds -- for the ones that went through. I had to re-initiate a number of times to get the call attempt to "take". The person who handed me the phone had the same problems -- and in the case of the Ericsson phone, they wouldn't even let me dial/initiate the call myself. I had calls that degraded in quality for one or both directions of the conversation. I had calls that degraded to the point that they dropped. What surprized me in this is i would have expected everyone elses calls to have dropped as well (thinking that we were all bounching off the same satellite), but they didn't, mine did. I found that short calls of a minute or two were, after waiting for the 30 second call establishment period, went thru OK, but if you talked for several minutes, the quality degraded and sometimes dropped. I went to the show with credit card in hand, wanting to buy, but came away disenchanted. (I won't even get into what I experienced over at the Iridium area -- which made Globalstar look very good, but still disappointing and unacceptable). The best call quality I experienced was on a (you guessed it) Nera Mini-M Inmarsat terminal. Yes, of course there was the GEO based delay, but the clarity and performace were excellent. One other thing i found disappointing with GSTRF phones: I was told there was no external snap-on antenna attachment like the Iridium phones have. With an Iridium phone you can snap-off the cattle-prod antenna and attach a cable to the back of the phone where you removed the antenna and then place a silver dollar sized mag mount antenna outside of your car. I was told by the Globalstar and Qcom people this would not be avaiable with their phones. I don't know how it will be possible to use a phone in your car without this type of external antenna accessory. I gave them my business card and requested early access on their "friendly" (i think that's what it was called) trial to shake the bugs out before Real Live Paying Customers get on. If that happens, I will report any experiences, positive or negative here. Geoff Goodfellow Prague, CZ