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

To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (18352)	10/25/2000 3:49:50 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 29992

Jeff, there was an earlier handset than the current QUALCOMM one. It never went on sale. I presume the Zenit and other delays meant that by the time the soft rollout got going, the second version was ready to produce and a whole product life-cycle was skipped. <Could it be that the first gen phones were to be proof of concept units all along?> I'm not sure how many iterations Ericsson has gone through since their acquisition of Orbitel in 1996 [which was the company contracted, along with Telit, to produce the GSM versions]. The wishful thinking expressed by dealers [and others] that the huge aerial be shrunk is wishful thinking. The link budgets* don't allow for that [given my limited technical understanding]. I think until the second or third constellations are up, we live with big aerials. But there is plenty of scope for functionality improvement with new ASICs and plenty of scope for shrinking the phone. Perhaps by putting most of it inside the aerial. Okay, that's wishful thinking but certainly they could store methanol, which will be fuel-cell fuel in a couple of years, inside the aerial as well as around the gizzards boards to save space. They should drown-proof the phone [and make it buoyant if they use methanol instead of heavy-metal batteries] since it is being sold like this; "Use this phone outside, when you are away in the bush, up a mountain or in a boat". It sometimes rains in such situations. Sometimes it rains a lot. It is being sold for emergency use. In emergencies, the phone will get wet as people use it in the rain, or swimming in the ocean or river after their yacht or kayak has sunk or plane has ditched. I gather there have been 'issues' between Globalstar and QUALCOMM over the years. Mqurice PS: I wish they would give us something to ponder in terms of sales. <...the companies involved sure give the rest of us things to ponder!> * 'Link budgets' means the addition of losses between the handset and satellite. The total losses have to leave enough signal to work the phone. If you get a tree in the way, you lose a bit more signal and the losses become too great to work the phone. That's a layman's understanding of what 'link budget' means.