FWIW The rest of the Web has NOT been business as usual for me. During the last 4 days I have been experiencing abominable response from many (but not all) sites. I never did have enough patience to connect with the U.S. Naval Institute which I think is in Annapolis Md. On Wednesday I even gave up on getting to a site in the Pend Oreille Valley network which , as the crow flies, is pretty close to us in Calgary. This forum has been slow but I have bailed out from it less than from any others. I thought perhaps my service provider at this end was at fault but in that case one would expect a pretty even distribution of slowness.

I believe the Smithsonian Air and Space magazine has a satellite status report at the end of each monthly issue. It might be interesting to check and see if anything related to telecommunications went out of service this week when the applicable issue comes out. Meanwhile I await the true explanation with interest.

Frank