A practical, internationally-ranging text which considers questions such as what are the procedures for applying for a licence? Where are licences for Western and Eastern Europe available? What are the regulations concerning the content of transmissions? And what are the copyright issues involved?

The shift from network-oriented to user-oriented services in the 80s and early 90s has increased the penetration of satellite services into the user community. Parallel to this, worldwide interest has arisen in Personal Communication Services (PCS), where satellites play a crucial role in the provision of PCS all over the world. Satellite Personal Communication Networks (S-PCN) are extremely attractive because they can serve a significant sector of the rapidly growing cellular market. This publication presents market perspectives and technological aspects in relation to satellite mobile and personal communication services. Papers were written by some of the most acclaimed European specialists in PCS. They present basic concepts and the latest research results.

This book of Proceedings contains papers of the "Third European Workshop on Mobile/Personal Satcoms" (EMPS '98), held in Venice, Italy, November 1998. For the third time, EMPS has given to the experts an opportunity for exchanging opinions and novel ideas in the exciting field of mobile and personal satellite communications. As with the 1996 edition, EMPS '98 issued a formal call for papers, gathering a large number of contributions from many different countries. Each submitted paper has been reviewed by international referees and, finally, selected by the Workshop Steering Committee (WSC). Furthermore, key-topics in the field of mobile/personal satcoms have also been focused on through a few invited papers. As EMPS has been conceived to gather trends and novelties in the field of mobile/personal satcoms, it is tightly matched to the natural evolution of the field itself. In this frame, the reader will notice how the dominant topics are related to system and network issues, while a very little number of contributions have been provided in the propagation and channel related areas. This represents a natural trend of a field, where deep efforts have been paid in the past years to understanding and modelling the physical layer and where the present interest is mostly migrating to the applications. Further changes and novelties may be envisaged in the future of this field. I believe that EMPS will continue to represent an effective opportunity to catch and understand more deeply this evolution.

Satellite Communications and Navigation Systems publishes the proceedings of the 2006 Tyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communications. The book focuses on the integration of communication and navigation systems in satellites.

This book of proceedings contains papers for the Second European Workshop on Mobile/Personal Satcoms (EMPS '96), held in Rome, Italy, and hosted by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. The EMPS '96 workshop follows the edition of two years ago, and is intended as an occasion for exchange of information and opinions among experts in the fast-growing field of mobile satellite communications. With respect to the first successful edition we only made one main modification. We issued a formal call for papers, instead oflimiting the selection process to invited papers as was in the past: 60 papers were received from 18 countries. Each paper has been reviewed by at least two referees, and then 41 papers were selected by the Workshop Steering Committee (WSC). An invited introductory lecture opens the workshop and is given by Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi, who is also honorary chairman of EMPS '96. Satellite Personal Communications Networks (SPCNs) are now expected to grow very fast, even beyond the most optimistic forecast: their unique feature to establish ex abrupto a world-wide communication fabric is certainly the winning card. Market analyses now indicate that LEO networks already planned to be operational around 1998 even risk being overwhelmed by users request, so that their extensions are already being considered. And, additionally, multimedia SPCNs are also being introduced at higher frequencies to provide broadband services.