General Motors Corp’s Los Angeles-based Hughes Aircraft Co and Spar Aerospace Ltd of Canada have been chosen to build two satellites for mobile communications services throughout North America by American Mobile Satellite Corp fo Washington and Telesat Mobile Inc in Montreal: each is putting up $100m for the new Hughes line of three-axis body-stabilised HS 601 satellites – Hughes will provide the satellite bus and Spar is responsible for the communications payload; each satellite has sufficient capacity to support up to 3,000 radio channels and will cover the entire continental US, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and 200 miles of US and Canadian coastal waters; both operators will provide complementary mobile telephone, radio, data and positioning service to land, aviation and maritime users starting in 1994.
