1 SDP TOPICAL Dish on the Roof The world has become smal 1. When you want it, it comes into your living-room via space and satellite. In colour and stereo. And in almost endless variety. wo domestic television channels and three radio programmes have for some time now been found insufficient to satisfy our increased appetite for information. We want to be on-the-spot whatever happens. The future goes under the names Panamsat, Eutelsat, lntelsat or Astra. An (automatically) adjustable parabolic antenna of 60 cm diameter, a receiver, a converter (which can process the signals received so !hat the television set can "read" them)-and, virtually normal in Austria, two permits, one from the Federal Chancellery and the other from the programme producer. That is all. Set up in this way and Mr and Mrs Austrian can already switch on 28 television and dozens of radio programmes from all over the world using the "dish" on the roof. Behind this there is some fascinating technology. Using enormous rockets several communications satellites are launched in so-called "stationary" orbit every year so !hat they seem to "hang" in the sky over a particular point on Earth. For between six and ten years, powered by energy from the sun they relay programmes back to Earth. And there are more and more all the time. In the course of this year Arts Channel, Sky News, Sky Movies, Sky Radio, Eurosport (with several sound-tracks, including one in German) and the European Business Channel from Switzerland will be added. And since the European Ariane 4 rocket went up in June all the important American TV programmes can be seen too. For the Big Listener there are already, e.g., Deutschlandfunk, Voice of America, the popmusic stations Radio Nova, Cable 1 and Radio 10 as weil as, soon, the French THE FUTURE round-the-clock news programme France Info. The difficulty of deciding becomes ever greater. The only question is when to find time for work. 9
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