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Madhumathi D.S.

BANGALORE, Jan. 24

WITH Insat-3C launched on Thursday, ISRO has made its fourth bid at the ambitious MSS (mobile satellite service) and hopes to succeed this time round.

The `type A' MSS will enable users to actually carry their voice, data and fax on satellite-based devices.

Though it will primarily be for Defence purposes in the foreseeable future, there are also civilian expectations of it from disaster prone States such as Orissa, Gujarat or the plantations in the North-East.

It will also enable short messaging system.

An MSS should also cheer up the Indian Defence services who have had to rely on Inmarsat's `mini M' systems for strategic communications.

Though the messages are encrypted, the Inmarsat hubs are located in Indonesia and Europe and do little to quell fears of interception.

"There is no security like having our own MSS, even if it will only be a national beam. Of course, the army or the navy, which will use this, will encrypt it again when it takes over the signals from (service provider) BSNL,'' sources told Business Line.

For at least three years now, Defence electronics hardware major BEL has been waiting with its `briefcase type' gadget to provide the MSS, while BSNL has put up a hub developed by C-DoT right in Bangalore.

Another experimental short messaging centre (of type C) is in Delhi. All that the mobile service needed was a functional Insat transponder.

ISRO did put MSS payloads on its 2C, 2D and then again on 3B in March 2001.

The 2C, now close to retirement, had problem on one link; 2D was lost in orbit in October 1997, while the 3B transponder had problems and could not provide a whole, 24-hour service.

The messaging service, though, is on. "All this did prove the concept,'' the sources said.

This time, ISRO has put up one MSS transponder which operates in the S-band for uplink and C band in the downlink.

Should the MSS click - which officials in the Department of Space here do not doubt - BEL may well move into technology collaboration in the next six months and come out with 500-1,000 pieces of its `briefcase type' products for land use.

It also has plans for weather-proof maritime gadgets with a stabiliser to offset the ship's roll.

For BEL, this may mean a few crores of rupees investment in a new facility at Chennai, where such stabilisers are made.

The land gadget could easily cost Rs 5 lakh (double the cost of the Inmarsat set) and the ship-based mobile marisat terminal, Rs 7.5 lakh.

But the user can recover the higher cost from the far lower service charges, for BSNL has worked out a charge of Rs 20 per three minutes against the $1-2 per minute charged by Inmarsat.

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