Sunday guests of Mr. and Mrs. J. E.

Sunday guests of Mr. and Mrs. J. E. Woodward. Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Latham and daughter of Fredericksburg were recent visitors of Mrs. A. C. Latham and of Mr. and Mrs. T. C. Barron. The Lathams are spending six weeks in Blacksburg where Mr. Latham is attending classes at V.P.I. Guests during the weekend of Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Terhune were Mr. and Mrs. Richard Hanson and children of Lanham, Md. Guests Tuesday of Mrs. Charlie Priest were Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Clements of Manassas Park, Mrs. Carroll Frazier, Warrenton, and Mrs. Dolly Melbourne and their families and Robbie Settle of Manassas. Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews entertained with a picnic last Sunday In honor of the 77th birthday of Mrs. Andrews’ mother, Mrs. Clara Ashby. Those present were Mr. and Mrs. John Leister, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Forsythe and Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Andrews and their families, all of College Park, Md., Mr. and Mrs. Tony Anastasi and family of Silver Spring, Md., Mr. and Mrs. John Gardner of Richmond and Mr. and Mrs. Carroll Allen and family of Arlington. Miss Carol Rowzie and Mrs. Kenneth McNeil of Richmond were over night guests Saturday of their parents Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Rowzie.

Overseas Phone

Calls Via Satellite

Telephone subscribers who call overseas may not know it, but their voices are traveling by satellite with increasing regularity these days.

Communications satellites, supplementing the longer-established undersea cables, are carrying a steadily growing number of telephone calls to parts of Europe and the Pacific. But satellites are just beginning to cast their shadow across the globe.

According to F. Wayne Dementi, local manager for The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Virginia, satellite telephone service will be available before long to Africa, South America, the Middle East and Asia. The construction of new ground stations in these distant lands and the launching of highr- capacity satellites will make this expansion possible.

Some of the countries planning to open ground stations within the next few years are Nigeria, Morocco, Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Greece, Singapore and Korea, Stations will be opened this summer in Panama and Chile. At this end, ground stations are being built in West Virginia, California and Puerto Rico. They will be used in conjunction with the 1,200-circuit Intelsat facilities planned for launching later this year. “This expansion of satellite facilities will make additional overseas circuits available and it will enable us to improve the quality of telephone service to some areas now reached only via high frequency radio,’. Dementi says. He added:

“Satellites, operating alongside existing high-quality cables, are making it as easy to call around the world as around the comer.”

The Bell System, which is the world’s largest commercial user of satellite facilities, operates about 250 satellite circuits to route calls to and from the United States. It anticipates that more than 2,000 satellite circuits will be needed in the early 1970s. In fact, a point will be reached in the next decade when satellite circuits carrying overseas conversations will outnumber cable circuits.

AT&T’s Long Lines Department, which is the Bell System’s overseas and interstate operating unit, leases satellite circuits from the Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat) for handling calls between the United States and points abroad.

The Bell System, which pioneered in space communications with its successful Telstar experiment in 1962, maintains a continuing interest in the field. Its engineers, working closely with Comsat engineers, are involved with

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