Wesley's Tool-Box

On December 10, 1981, South Korea's Ministry of Communications (체신부) separated the telecommunication sector from itself to form a public corporation called Korea Telecom (한국전기통신공사; currently KT Corporation) in order to modernize telecommunication service. And then, this company created a subsidiary called Korea Mobile Telecommunications Services Corporation (KMTSC; 한국이동통신서비스(주); currently SK Telecom) on March 29, 1984, to manage mobile telecommunication sector. In May of the same year, it started the "car phone" service based on the analog AMPS (1G) cellular phone technology around the Seoul metropolitan area. This marked the beginning of the mobile phone service in Korea.

The frequencies used at the time was 824 - 849MHz uplink and 869 - 894MHz downlink, which was 25MHz bandwidth each way. This is outlined in the Ministry of Communications Notice No.43 (May 9, 1991). KMTSC changed its name to Korea Mobile Telecommunications Corporation (KMTC; 한국이동통신(주)) as it was selected as a public common carrier on April 30, 1988. Nationwide AMPS network was set up by the end of 1991.

In 1994, a big restructuring effort was put into the telecommunications sector. In January, Sunkyong Group (선경그룹; currently SK Group) took over KMTC and privatized it by purchasing 24% of its stocks. Shinsegi Telecom Inc.(신세기통신(주); STI), which was selected to be the 2nd mobile carrier in Korea and had POSCO as its largest shareholder, was founded on May 2. This established the competitive market for mobile phone services.

Interestingly, Sunkyong Group was originally selected as the 2nd mobile carrier in 1992, but its CEO an in-law to the then-president Roh Tae-woo, sparking preferential treatment controversy. It relinquished the rights on August 27 of that year. It ended up entering the telecommunications market by buying up the 1st mobile carrier instead. KMTC changed its name to SK Telecom on March 1997 is called by that name to this day.

[Frequency Allotment 1984 - 1995]

AMPS (1G)
KMTC: Uplink 824 - 849MHz / Downlink 869 - 894MHz

I've risked the streaking and went with lower ISO and longer exposure for today's comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy photo. I've experimented with the micro-adjustment head (Longperng TP98AR) that finally arrived late last night after much delay to see if that would help reduce the streaking, but manual compensation proved to be quite difficult. So, after about an hour of fiddling I ended up taking simple long exposure photos just before the Sun came up.

As a note, I waited for another pass of Tiangong-1 half about twenty minutes later, but either the calculations were off or it was too dim (it was supposed to be around magnitude 1) against the brightening morning sky to be seen.

Settings: SX50 HS - 243mm - ISO 800 - 15s - f/5.6
Time: 2013-11-26 06:26 - 06:29 KST
Location: Suwon, Korea
7 photos stacked with RegiStax 6.1.0.8