The ITU Radiocommunication Assembly considering that the very nature of Satellite News Gathering (SNG) requires that earth stations are used for short periods of time and for specific news gathering purposes and hence must be activated in an expedient manner; that highly portable transmitlreceive stations are essential for sound news gathering operations under conditions where other forms of communications of the needed quality are not readily available; that low bit rate coding methods, such as ISO/IEC 11 172-3 layers II and III,are already defined that provide various levels of audio quality for sound news gathering; that these stations could provide data communications for exchange of text; that technologies exist that could provide this service.