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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Drew Williams who wrote (1553)	3/18/2000 9:57:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12231

<Qualcomm owns about 11% of Globalstar, > actually only about 5% Drew, not 11%. Today, [having had a few days jaunting around LA and now back in San Diego], I passed the time sitting on the hill in the sun overlooking the old Qualcomm HQ! which is now a sadder looking place with the 'Ericsson' sign having replaced the QUALCOMM one. I was generally taking in the scene of Mira Mesa but particularly the Globalstar gateways which live just behind the Ericsson building in the car park of the Qualcomm building which is just behind the Design Centre building [the Ericsson infrastructure building]. The antenna without the spherical balloon over it was busy tracking satellites. The balloons are apparently a visual improvement to keep city officials happy - though I can't see why that looks better than a good, honest, interesting, working antenna. The dish lies in wait for a satellite, then follows it over the sky for about 10 or 15 minutes [depending on the trajectory of the particular satellite over the region] then zooms back to the horizon to lock onto the next satellite. The zooming took 17 seconds to swing through about 150 degrees. Meanwhile, Iridium is to be burned up on atmospheric re-entry. $5bn of human ingenuity, effort and hopes down the drain. Those Motorola people must have known it wouldn't work - it was obvious way back in 1996, 1997 before they launched. You can read my many rants! I hope they weren't so cynical as to just continue to launch simply to collect their contractual fees and management charges. If I was a shareholder I'd be VERY suspicious. Sure, it might have worked, but with ICO and Globalstar coming along, they were not going to compete and it was obvious, even if it did work well. Now the dread is that Globalstar is going to continue to trundle down the high-priced minutes trajectory that Iridium flew through. No wonder the GSTRF share price is a third the price during high hopes a couple of months ago. Since Iridium only had about 1.3bn minutes per year to sell and Globalstar has about 10bn per year, Iridium's demise won't make any difference in the long run and the news is really a year old already. Though it was amazing that Iridium shareholders didn't seem to 'get it', continuing to buy at $3 or something not long ago! Mqurice