Over 60 music and news channels at near-CD quality are on offer 24 hours a day

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The rock band Queen recorded Radio Ga Ga in 1984. In the lyrics, drummer Roger Taylor worried that visual surfeit would dull our ears to entertainment heard but not seen.

He was hopeful though: Radio - he said through vocalist Freddie Mercury - was still to have its finest hour. Would that have been during the peak of the fever known as Frequency Modulation, or FM for short? Or is it still to come with the growth of satellite radio?

As a concept, the latter doesn't sound new. At least not to the generation that has spent evenings coaxing squealing BBC World Service reports from radio sets thousands of miles from London.

However, shortwave radio is essentially a ground-based system, using a layer of the earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere to bounce signals around the world. If a satellite comes into play it is just to reflect a radio signal to a terrestrial transmission centre.

When Worldspace says satellite radio, they mean you can listen to the same dedicated jazz channel at near-CD quality throughout a drive from South Africa to the south of France (tunnels excluded).

You can receive Kenya Broadcasting Corp. in Shanghai, and Radio Caroline on a dune in the middle of the Empty Quarter; or on a boat on the Indian Ocean. And because the system is digital, reception is rain-proof, hiss-, howl- and fade-free, and does not demand surgeon-like control of a tuning knob.

"Worldspace is the company that pioneered satellite radio," says M. Sebastian, vice-president and general manager of the company. From the design of the transmission technologies to the launch of the satellites, Worldspace has set up its system from scratch.

On October 24, Tabloid carried a story on satellite radio developments in the US, specifically the companies XM Radio and Sirius. XM Radio is a sister concern of Worldspace, and holds the rights for North America.

Worldspace has pretty much the rest of the world in its antenna sights. It currently covers Europe, Africa and Asia via two satellites (Afristar and Asiastar), with plans to include South America with a third (Ameristar).

The service has been available in Dubai for some months now, with customers here benefiting from the overlap of Afristar and Asiastar's footprints: they have over 60 channels to choose from.

"The most important aspect of Worldspace," says Sebastian, "is its unique content."

Divided into three segments, the first offers Western music fans a dedicated channel for a range of genres including classical, rock, classic rock, pop, jazz and dance.

The second is a bouquet of international broadcasters such as CNN International, Bloomberg, BBC, All India Radio, Fox News and Talk Sports.

The third offers regional programming such as BBC Arabic, Indian classical and film music, and channels in Arabic, French, German, Swahili, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Malayalam.

All channels offer 24-hour service and most of the genre-based ones are advertisement free. Worldspace toyed initially with the idea of making all channels advertisement free, but realised that some broadcasters have voices that should not be broken.

Says Sebastian, "There are certain formats to channels that people have lived with. For example, NPR. Talk to any American and he will tell what the value of NPR is. We didn't want to change it, so you get the feeling (you're) getting a voice from home."

A voice from home is exactly what the expatriate ordered, and Worldspace provides for all of Dubai's technicolour population. Thanks to direct uplinks, channels such as these are mere seconds behind what home audiences hear.

So should this electromagnetic manna make Dubai's FM channels worry? Sebastian doesn't think so. "Even though we belong to the same family of audio entertainment, both of us have our own space. FM is very interactive, very local orientated. It gives you traffic updates, discussions of issues and city happenings, contests…

"Worldspace is more for a serious listener. I don't mean the programming is serious, but its for somebody who wants quality music and quality entertainment."

Also, he points out, Worldspace's revenue comes from subscriptions, not advertising. And that revenue is pouring in. Satellite radio's subscription growth rate has been so rapid, industry watchers suggest it may be The Next Big Thing.

These days however, watchers use those words so often, it's getting harder to sweep customers off their feet.

But some suggest satellite radio will do for audio entertainment what cable TV did for television. "(Satellite radio) is the fastest growing entertainment category in the history of the US," claims Sebastian. The only other technology that came close, he says, was the DVD.

It's not just audio that Worldspace can deliver. Each receiver can download data from the satellite at the rate of 128kbps. Right now the system is not available to the individual subscriber, but it gives companies exciting possibilities.

Sebastian explains: "Anybody who wants to send data from one location to multiple locations can use the system. Sitting on a seashore or in the middle of a forest I can download any kind of file - from a Powerpoint presentation to images."

Possibilities include distance education, weather data dissemination - even cross-border board meetings. The biggest advantages over the internet are a constant, high speed data rate and a lack of dependance on terrestrial systems.

For now though, Worldspace subscribers recieve audio only, and plenty of it. Nobody can say yet whether it's radio's finest hour, but if the stations Radio Ga Ga and Radio Goo Goo are out there, they're on satellite radio.