This book of Proceedings contains papers of the "Third European Workshop on Mobile/Personal Satcoms" (EMPS '98), held in Venice, Italy, November 1998. For the third time, EMPS has given to the experts an opportunity for exchanging opinions and novel ideas in the exciting field of mobile and personal satellite communications. As with the 1996 edition, EMPS '98 issued a formal call for papers, gathering a large number of contributions from many different countries. Each submitted paper has been reviewed by international referees and, finally, selected by the Workshop Steering Committee (WSC). Furthermore, key-topics in the field of mobile/personal satcoms have also been focused on through a few invited papers. As EMPS has been conceived to gather trends and novelties in the field of mobile/personal satcoms, it is tightly matched to the natural evolution of the field itself. In this frame, the reader will notice how the dominant topics are related to system and network issues, while a very little number of contributions have been provided in the propagation and channel related areas. This represents a natural trend of a field, where deep efforts have been paid in the past years to understanding and modelling the physical layer and where the present interest is mostly migrating to the applications. Further changes and novelties may be envisaged in the future of this field. I believe that EMPS will continue to represent an effective opportunity to catch and understand more deeply this evolution.

1 Network, Mobility and Resources.- Mobility and Resource Management for S-PCN and Integration with Terrestrial Mobile Networks.- Performance Evaluation of Resource Management Schemes for Non- GSO Satellite Communications.- Extended Analytical Model for Calculating the Quality of Service (QoS) in a Mobile Satellite System (MSS) with a Guaranteed Handover (GH) Service.- Time Domain Interference/Capacity Analysis for non-GEO Satellite Constellations.- Interbeam Handover in LEO Satellite Systems.- A Signaling Level Simulation for Mobile Communication Network.- Analysis of Tele-Traffic Performance in Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Mobile Networks.- Performance of Semi-Permanent Call Set-Up Protocol in S-PCN.- Handover Performance of a LEOS Communication System with Overlaid and Overlapped Cell Arrangement.- 2 Satellite Systems.- Global Spaceborn Telemetry and Telecommand Infrastructure for LEO Satellites.- ASI Perspectives in Satellite Mobile Communications.- Artemis Spacecraft Navigation Payload.- Design of Mobile Communications via a Geosynchronous Satellite: Land-Mobile Satellite Systems.- Personal Mobile Telephony using Stratospheric Platforms.- 3 Multimedia, S-UMTS.- Wideband-CDMA Approaches for the Satellite UMTS Component.- Development and Implementation of Satellite-UMTS Network Signalling Protocols.- Provision of Video-on-Demand Services via Broadband GEO Satellite Systems.- Multiservice Traffic Model and Bandwidth Demand for Broadband Satellite Systems.- On the capacity of UMTS Satellite Component.- 4 Implementation Aspects.- Analysis and Modelling of Adaptive Antennas for a Handheld Terminal in the Presence of a Person.- Performance Evaluation of Satellite Constellations. The CONSIM(TM) Simulator Concept and Architecture.- Optical Crosslinks for BroadbandSatellite Networks.- The Design and Fabrication of a Novel 1/2 Watt, ?>52% Solid Phase Epitaxy Processed MMIC Power Amplifier for Ka-Band Wireless Applications.- Fading analysis on non-Rayleigh and non-Rician Channels for Cellular- Mobile Radio Communications.- Satellite-to-Indoor Propagation Modelling for LEOS Communication Systems.- 5 Modulation, Coding and Access.- Tandeming/Transcoding Issues Between MPEG-4 and H.263.- Multi-user Cancellation Detector for UMTS CDMA Satellite Communications.- Performance Evaluation of a Multi Carrier CDMA System for LEO, MEO Mobile Satellite Communications.- Variable Rate CPFSK Modulation technique.- Trellis Decoding of RS Codes in Mobile Satellite Communication Channel.- The performance of Interleaved BCH (63, 39,4) Codes in the Mobile Channel with Four Different Modulations, Two Different Vehicle Speeds.- Structural Correlation between Signal and CW Interference in DS/SS Systems with Non-Linearity.- EMPS'98 Contributors.- Author Index.