Historians and politicians continue to debate who won the Gulf War, but anyone glued round-the- clock to their TV set will tell you the v-inner vvas CNN. With its live, raw, and riveting coverage, Ted Turner's 24-hour Cable News Network became the information source for an international audience that included everyone from competing news organizations to Saddam Hussein. For many of its live visual reports, CNN relied on on~ of its four mobile satellite communications systems, also called transportable earth stations, or "flyaways." The flyaways accept signals from standard video cam- eras and include video and audio processing equip- ment, a dish antenna for transmitting the signals via satellite, alld amplifiers for powering the system. ~lobile satellite technology has been in use at CNN since 1984, according to Dick Tauber, director of satellites and circuits for CNN. But the recent de~Telopment of more compact earth stations, with smaller antennas that broadcast on th~ higher-frequency Ku-band rather than C-band, has increased the systems' mobility and has cut the amount of time it takes news crews to set up and link up with a satellite. What once too] nearly a day now takes a few hours, he said. "The C-band transportable earth sta- tions took up a lot of cargo space - you needed a large truck, an 18-wheeler, because of the great big antenna," Tauber said. With Ku-band flyaway systems, antenna sizes have shrunk to about six to eight feet, compared with the more than 100 feet needed for C-band communications. The 13 components of the S-l Flyaway weigh less than 100 pounds each and fit into crates approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. FAA approval is a major selling point for the technol- ogy - instead of sending the flyaways as freight using cargo services, "we can ship the vv-hole thing as excess baggage on a commercial flight," Tauber said. "NOVV everything hits the ground at the same time: crew, reporters and a dozen or two boxes." The flyaways sell for between $200,000 to $340,000 and are approved by the Washington, D.C.-based International Telecommunications Organization (Intelsat), a 25-year-old cooperative of more than 120 member countries who ovvn and operate a global com- munications satellite system. "It's the concept of the global village," said Arnold .~leyers, manager of broad- cast services for Intelsat. "If anything happens in a country, there's more interest in seeing pictures live. " During the Gulf War and the tense period preceding it, CNN found itself competing with news organizations that also had deployed earth stations for live broadcasts. It had to move quickly to contract for satellite access time with the Iraqi, E~uwaiti and Saudi Arabian govern- ment ministries responsible for handling Intelsat com- munications services - a logistical nightmare Tauber described in one word: "Maalox." Today, three of CNN's flyaways are based in Atlanta and a fourth is stationed in London. "Before the war, there vvere 30 to 40 licensed transportable flyaways around the world," Tauber said. "But by the time the vvar was over, there were 130." Along with the flyaways, CNN has been issuing portable satellite phones to its news teams, Tauber said. With these phones, CNN reporters and crews in the field are virtually guaranteed an open channel of com- munication with more than l 5 foreign bureaus and CNN's Atlanta headquarters. But no matter how successful its satellite communi- cations solutions have been, CNN continues to explore even better ways to provide live coverage from news scenes around the vvorld. Tauber's group is watching the development of new digital video technologies, including video compression, that will make it possible to send live video over the telephone. One of the most promising of these technologies is Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), a video and audio compression standard expected to be finalized later this year. C-Cube Microsystems, a San Jose, Calif.- based compression systems developer, and Bell Atlantic have already demonstrated a prototype MPEG-based system capable of transmitting high-quality video from a central video file server to subscriber homes via stan- dard copper telephone lines. Tauber believes it will be three to five years before digital video technology will be cost-effective and capable of handling the netv--ork's broadcast-quality requirements. But he's not worried about the wait. "Time flies when you're doing bench tests," he said with a laugh. - - -