BROADCAST WHEELS : High-Tech Trucks Dish Up News From Seoul to Santa Ana

Live from Antarctica: Seals swimming, penguins standing on ice floes and South Korean research scientists paddling skiffs. With the help of three satellites, the polar scene became part of a televised state-of-the-union address in South Korea.

Live from Ann Arbor: a Domino’s Pizza manager explains on television a new system to take pizza delivery orders more efficiently, then takes questions by telephone from Domino workers watching the program at 20 regional centers.

Live from Calgary: ABC is broadcasting by satellite from the Winter Olympics. But also on hand is a truckload of fancy electronics that makes 700 temporary telephones there work as part of ABC’s in-house phone system in New York City. ABC News President Roone Arledge “can pick up a phone in Calgary, dial four digits and get a producer in New York,” said Peter F. Hartz, vice president for sales and marketing at Culver City-based IDB Communications Group.

In government and politics, in business and entertainment, TV broadcasts increasingly come to us live from distant places. They come with the help of satellites and ever more portable electronics that shoot microwave signals to the sky and back.

And more and more, the technology to do that is an important business. Companies are selling sophisticated gear that fits on the back of a truck, in a cargo plane or suspended under a helicopter.

Sending pictures by satellite is not all that complicated. Television cameras turn images into electronic data, and the data goes to trucks loaded with high-tech equipment. There the data is turned into microwaves and beamed into space.

A technician aims a very narrow beam of those microwaves at a satellite orbiting about 22,500 miles above the earth’s surface. Precise aim is needed in pointing the signal over such distances at a 30-foot-long satellite.

The signal is captured by the satellite and then transmitted back with greater power to satellite dishes on Earth. The signal blankets a large portion of the earth’s surface, but can only be picked up and fed into television sets using satellite dishes with the necessary decoding equipment.

Occasional misadventures and the technology’s limitations notwithstanding, in the past six years at least a score of companies have sprung up that rent trucks packed with satellite communications equipment for as little as $3,500 a day. Unsurprisingly, most of the demand for live television comes from the networks and local television stations.

But the demand has gone beyond media organizations hungry to be first with news. A few private corporations have also bought satellite trucks in an effort to speed up internal communications and save on travel expenses for executive meetings.

Major corporations are paying up to $750,000 each to buy the trucks, plus $200 to $800 an hour for satellite time. Receiving antennas for each of a company’s branches cost $4,000 to $40,000 each, depending on the number and quality of antennas.

Domino’s last month bought a top-of-the-line truck and has four hours a month of live broadcast. Videotapes of new cooking and management techniques were old news by the time they reached all of the company’s offices, said Gwen L. Hengehold, manager of the company’s video satellite network.

Empire of America Federal Savings Bank, based in Buffalo, N.Y., bought a truck in 1985 and uses it to broadcast meetings of top executives, with senior managers in out-of-state branches watching office TV sets and telephoning in comments. Empire has branches in Florida, Michigan, Texas and California, so televised conferences can be cheaper than flying in executives for meetings, broadcast coordinator Mike Andrei said.

One of the flashiest uses came at the beginning of a recent state of the union address by South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan.

A Chilean C-130 cargo plane carried a portable set of satellite transmission gear to Antarctica. Live scenes of penguins and scientists were bounced off one satellite to New York, off another satellite to Los Angeles and finally off a third satellite over the Pacific Ocean to Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

Hwan hailed the establishment of the polar research station as evidence of South Korea’s growing international stature.

“We had the State Department call us up and tell us how important it was that it go well,” recalled Hartz of IDB, which rented the satellite equipment.

This year’s presidential primaries are also providing a bonanza for the 20 to 30 start-up companies that rent one or two satellite trucks apiece. In Iowa two weeks ago and New Hampshire last week, dozens of satellite trucks prowled rural highways and squatted outside press centers, beaming up pictures of candidates and rallies for the major networks and consortiums of television stations.

Calhoun Satellite, a fledgling satellite truck rental company in Miami, will soon lease a second truck to help cover 36 events, mostly sports, that are booked for live transmission in March.

“We’re so busy right now I’m turning away work,” said Calhoun Vice President David Fruitman.

Two different kinds of satellite trucks are made. The older, more reliable but more expensive trucks carry equipment that transmits on the so-called C-band microwave frequency, used since the infancy of communications satellites. The new, cheaper trucks take advantage of a higher-energy microwave frequency, the Ku-band.

Ku-band has three major advantages over C-band: availability, cost and mobility. The big disadvantage--reliability--is not proving as troublesome as some engineers had predicted, experts say.

Ku-band’s biggest advantage is that it is only used for satellites, while phone companies and corporations use C-band for transmitting telephone calls among microwave towers. A Ku-band truck can park at a disaster scene in a downtown area and start sending pictures within an hour, while a C-band satellite transmitter can be set up only after paying a local clearing house up to $500 to spend a day or more finding out what frequencies are already in local use.

Satellite operators who drown out the local phone company can lose their Federal Communications Commission license, said Woody Hubbell of Minneapolis-based Conus Satellite Services. “If you knock those guys down, it’s worse than messing with God.”

Ku-band trucks also are smaller than C-band trucks, and thus cheaper and more mobile. IDB charges $4,500 to rent a C-band truck with all accessories for a single day, and $3,500 for a Ku-band, Hartz said.

About 130 Ku-band trucks are now on the road, said Clyde L. Combs Jr., of Plano, Tex.-based Dalsat, which is building 10 to 12 trucks a year. Television stations and companies that rent to them buy about 40% of the portable satellite transmission sets the company builds. Corporations like Domino’s account for another 38% of demand and local phone firms for the remaining 22%, he said.

The biggest barrier to Ku-band transmissions was thought to be “rain fade,” the tendency for water in the atmosphere to absorb the signal, especially as it comes down from the satellite. But the risk was downplayed by experiments in the early 1980s.

Fruitman said that in two years of operating a satellite truck he had only lost his signal once. “The only rain fade was once in Texas, during a hurricane with 85-mile-an-hour winds.”

Even boosters admit that many people know the technology only by its odd-looking trucks. “When it drives along,” said Empire of America’s Andrei, “it looks like this funny-shaped truck with this white funny-shaped thing on the back.”