Satellite Instructional Television Experiment Research Articles

Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE): a case study in the triumphs and frustrations of state-sponsored science in India

Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) was an experiment rooted in the philosophy of Nehruvian socialist science, Vikram Sarabhai’s leapfrogging vision, and the Indian scientific community’s dedication to the development of the county. It was designed and executed for educating and connecting the people of the country. Yash Pal, the figure of modern scientific education in India, played a crucial role to realize this dream project. Though SITE was not entirely successful in fulfilling its role, it did lay foundations for a bigger space science objective for education. In this essay, I explore the progress of socialist science and its impact on major scientific developmental projects through the SITE. It also takes into account several oral history anecdotes from the interactions I had with Yash Pal and his colleagues over several years.

Public policy and the digital deadline: The implementation of the Digital Addressable System (DAS) in West Bengal

The introduction of the mandatory Digital Addressable System (DAS) with strict, phase-wise deadlines for different provinces within India has compelled us to reconsider not only the television apparatus itself but also broadcast policies, television industry, content and reception. The introduction of DAS can be posited within a series of similar public policies starting from the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) project in 1975 to the more recent Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or Aadhaar project and Digital India campaign, all folded into the developmental rhetoric of the welfare state. The rollout of DAS provides the site to explore the relationship between the government, neo-liberal market and digital technologies that underscores the contradictions which are constitutive of modernity, and invests in the study of the neo-liberal cultural sites of statist intervention. Within this conceptual framework, this article would focus on West Bengal as a case in point to read the implementation of mandatory DAS both as a site of hegemonic projects embodying promises of neo-liberal development and of the incongruities that are inherent in them. While the union government claimed that any cable television service provider who does not switch to digital signal within deadline can be penalized and the equipment confiscated, the state Government said that they would launch an agitation if analogue cable signals were blacked out after the deadline for cable digitalization and thus, the deadline was extended for several months. The confrontation over cable digitalization in West Bengal offers a site to explore in what way, contrary to its typical image of a fully automated digital ecosystem of governance, as the modern states would like to conceive, it is loaded with internal contradiction. My inquiry moves across a range of discursive locations and registers, aiming to explore in what way various local stakeholders negotiate in this policy implementation? How does DAS help theorization of a changing relationship between the market, digital technology and the developmental modern? While raising these questions, this article would try to explore in what way DAS can be located within the historical trajectory of techno-cultural rhetoric of public policy and how it invests in the shifting political economy of broadcasting in India.

Displacing Creativity: Artists, Space Scientists and Audience-Led Television in 1970s India

From August 1975 to August 1976 the Indian space agency’s world-leading Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, known as SITE, broadcast to 2,400 villages across the country. This early project of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) defined a societal remit still considered the formational imaginary behind the space agency’s range of remote sensing and planetary activities. The paper focuses on a brief span of time following SITE when opportunities opened for village residents to take control of the media, and this came about in part through initiatives in which creative practitioners working with the space agency introduced methods of co-production. The shift in creative agency from producers to audiences carried radical possibilities for social mobility and locally determined, rather than state-led, development initiatives. The purpose of this short paper is to highlight how creativity coincided with audience-led innovation. Opportunities for audiences to use the technical equipment opened as creative methods of co-production became more commonplace, such that innovation reflected the cultural values, or cognitive matrix, of the audience. Although the shift in agency from producer to audience was unprecedented, it was swiftly suppressed when the national satellite broadcast system INSAT finally became operational in the 1980s, in spite of—or perhaps because of—this flourish of social innovation. Applying the concept “cognitive innovation” to this context foregrounds the limited opportunities available for rural television audiences to use the technology instrumentally for their own purposes. Displacing creativity, by dismantling the project and putting a halt to its emerging methods of co-production, was a way of delinking the audience from the technology and thereby imposing a different order. By indicating how creative activity accesses cognitive innovation, the paper introduces the notion of “displacing creativity” as a transferable measure of agency. It argues that where creativity is displaced, crucial mechanisms by which subalterns gain agency to act and to innovate are lost.

SATELLITE BASED EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN REMOTE SENSING AND GEO-INFORMATION: AN E-LEARNING APPROACH TO MEET THE GROWING DEMANDS IN INDIA

Abstract. One of the prime activities of Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Space Program is providing satellite communication services, viz., television broadcasting, mobile communication, cyclone disaster warning and rescue operations etc. so as to improve their economic conditions, disseminate technical / scientific knowledge to improve the agriculture production and education for rural people of India. ISRO, along with National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) conducted experimental satellite communication project i.e. Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) using NASA’s Advanced Telecommunication Satellite (i.e. ATS 6) with an objective to educate poor people of India via satellite broadcasting in 1975 and 1976, covering more than 2600 villages in six states of India and territories. Over the years India built communication satellites indigenously to meet the communication requirements of India. This has further lead to launch of an exclusive satellite from ISRO for educational purposes i.e. EDUSAT in 2004 through which rich audio-video content is transmitted / received, recreating virtual classes through interactivity. Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS) established in 1966, a premier institute in south East Asia in disseminating Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS), mainly focusing on contact based programs. But expanded the scope with satellite based Distance Learning Programs for Universities, utilizing the dedicated communication satellite i.e. EDUSAT in 2007. IIRS conducted successfully eight Distance Learning Programs in the last five years and training more than 6000 students mainly at postgraduate level from more than 60 universities /Institutions spread across India. IIRS obtained feedback and improved the programs on the continuous basis. Expanded the scope of IIRS outreach program to train user departments tailor made in any of the applications of Remote Sensing and Geoinformation, capacity building for ISRO’s operational projects / new satellite missions, developing e-learning contents and launching e-learning courses under twelfth five year (i.e. 2012–17) plan period of Government of India, in addition to continuing of existing distance learning programs for universities.

Societal benefits of space technology

The introduction of any new technology inevitably leads to a number of benefits. Space technology has provided such benefits in fair abundance, and in a number of fields. In assessing benefits, however, it is necessary to differentiate between individual or corporate/commercial benefits and social benefits, since the two may not always by synonymous. This paper aims to examine the benefits derived through applications of space technology from this point of view. It takes India as a case-study and describes the benefits that have accrued from the use of space technology, beginning with the Indo-U.S. Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE, 1975–1976). It discusses the various gains from the on-going, operational multi-purpose INSAT system, and examines in-depth the issues like: what are the benefits, who benefits (i.e. which section of society) and how much. While the paper focuses mainly on the areas of broadcasting and telecommunications, it also touches on benefits from remote sensing and meteorology. It covers, in particular, the benefits expected to be derived from the Indian Remote Sensing satellites (IRS), the first of which was launched in March 1988. In the final section, the paper seeks to analyse the Indian experience from the view point of a more generalized perspective: the use of space technology in a developing country environment. Based on this, it draws certain conclusions about the benefits from space technology that may be generally applicable to most developing countries.

A systems approach to satellite delivered learning. Some Indian experiences

The advent, in the mid-1970's, of direct broadcasting service (DBS) via satellite opened up new opportunities to take high-quality education to remote and rural areas. The first large-scale effort at utilising this possibility was India's Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), carried out for a year in 1975-76 using the United States ATS-6 spacecraft. The very extensive evaluation of SITE provided valuable insights and information with regard to the use of a satellite for delivering education to rural audiences. These findings and experiences have had their impact in the planning, design and execution of the educational component of India's operational satellite system, INSAT. This paper describes efforts related to education in the SITE and INSAT projects, summarises the experiences and findings of the evaluation of SITE, and analyses the implications of these from an overall “systems” point of view. It concludes with some recommendations, many of which may be of relevance to other countries also - especially to those developing nations who are involved in the planning or execution of satellite-delivered learning systems.

The message and the experience of the site project

The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) was a unique effort aimed at studying the possibilities of satellite broadcasting for education and national development. This one-year joint India-USA project was carried out in 1975–1976 using the ATS-6 spacecraft. This paper briefly describes the experiment and its major findings. It goes on to distill the learning experiences derived from SITE and analyses the extent to which these have influenced the design and configuration of India's domestic satellite system, INSAT. INSAT-1B, which will serve as a replacement for the short-lived INSAT-1A, will be launched shortly and will be operational by the end of 1983. Its payload includes two S-band TV transponders capable of broadcasting directly to augmented TV sets. The paper examines which lessons of SITE are being applied in the planning and operationalisation of the TV system and discusses why others are not being taken account of. Major issues confronting TV system planners in developing countries like India are highlighted and the possible role of satellite broadcasting discussed in this context. The paper concludes by outlining an “ideal scenario” for a large, multilingual country like India, towards which TV planners could attempt to strive.

Performance Characteristics of an FM Demodulator

This paper contains a discussion of performance and threshold characteristics of a Wideband conventional FM demodulator using Limiter Discriminator. Complete description and results are presented. The static and dynamic threshold curves have been plotted experimentally. This demodulator has been used at Ahmedabad, Delhi and Amritsar SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) Earth Stations. During Satellite Telecommunication Experiment Project (STEP), this demodulator has also been used at Delhi, Ahemdabad and Madras earth stations and in Transportable Remote Area Communication Terminal (TRACT) made by Space Applications Centre (ISRO), Ahmedabad.

The Singular Success of SITE How Satellites Can Teach Indian Villages by Television

Abstract The first preliminary results of SITE, the joint Indian–American Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, which took place during 1975–1976 are reported here. Equipment reliability in Indian village was extremely high 90%, and the communities, often exposed to mass media for the first time, showed large gains in knowledge about health and hygiene, family planning and political awareness. Female audience were particularly attracted to the daily television programmes.

The Communication Effects Gap

The medium of television in the context of organized teleclubs with carefully designed content may actually be effective in leveling previous inequities and thus reduce the gap between larger and smaller farmers. The present research is unique in several respects: (1) it examines television for one of the first times in relation to the communication effects gap; (2) its results run contrary to many previous studies; (3) the study was conducted under field conditions in India on an extremely low budget, demonstrating a necessary resourcefulness ; (4) survey research methods are combined with content analysis; and (5) the results are crucially relevant to the Indian government's policy and to the recently initiated Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), in which the A TS-6 satellite broadcasts television programs to schoolchildren and adults in almost 2,400 villages in six different Indian states.

ATS-6 Satellite Instructional Television Experiment

The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) is scheduled for the second year of satellite operation. Applications Technology Satellite (ATS-6) will receive C-band video signals frorn Abmedabad and Delhi, India, and will retransmitt the video and two audio sub-carriers at 860 MHz to 6 clusters of 400 direct-receive stations for a total of 2400 direct-receive stations. Morning programs of 1.5 hours per day are designed for classroom use, and evening programs of 2.5 hours duration are designed for village adult education. Indian production antennas and television sets have been tested and found to meet specifications, and a successful experiment is anticipated.

Reliability Studies of Community Television Receivers for Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE)

In this paper various failures that occur in solidstate television receivers have been briefly discussed. Reliability calculations like Failure Rate, Mean Time Before Failure, etc., have been presented and suggestions made for minimizing the down-time of the receiver particularly from technoeconomic considerations.

What TV cannot do alone

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsBella ModyMs. Bella Mody is research scientist at the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment Space Applications Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation, Ahmedabad, India.

Site Selection Considerations for the Transmitter for Limited Rebroadcast Application in Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE)

The main features of the transmitter to be sited have been outlined. Various factors such as radio interference, meteorological, etc. which are to be taken into consideration for site selection have been discussed. The required ancillary facilities are indicated and explained.

TV-a challenge and an opportunity

The sixth Applications Technology Satellite (ATS-6), described as the world’s largest and most powerful communications spacecraft, is the first of a new generation of space robots. It is designed to transmit from synchronous orbit with power sufficient for its signals to be received by small and inexpensive ground stations. Educational television programming to isolated regions where terrestrial TV coverage is not feasible is being planned to demonstrate the capabilities of this 1,360 kg. craft. After the first year of operation, the ATS is to be moved over the Indian Ocean to transmit instructional material to some 3,000 community receivers in rural and remote villages in India. The satellite instructional television experiment should answer whether community sets used for direct reception could be maintained in working order; whether the instructional and educational programmes are effective; whether the results are adequate and commensurate with the money spent; and a host of such other questions.

Earth Station for Television Reception in Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE)

The receive-only Earth Station for the television reception is discussed. An effort has been made to project the salient features of spacecraft along with a discussion on the economic aspects of the various equipments such as low cost antenna, reception system, power supply system, etc. The performance calculations of the Earth Station have been presented in detail.

Television Receivers for Direct Reception from Broadcasting Satellites

The advent of high power geostationary satellites with large deployable antennae has opened new vistas for the application of direct satellite receivers. The Department of Space will conduct the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment using the Applications Technology Satellite-F to be launched by National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In this paper the detailed systems analysis using the parameters of ATS-F is presented. This analysis is used as the basis for establishing the design approach for the satellite receiver. The functional block diagram of the envisaged satellite TV receiver is given and the design objectives for the individual blocks are presented. The probable components cost of such a receiver is also given.