Recent advances in technology have enabled a family ofsmall microwave satellite communication terminals to be constructed. This paper describes one of these, a prototype manpack equipment which can be carried by asingle person. It was completed in mid-1978 and has since been demonstrated on numerous occasions.Using a suitable satellite, such equipment can be usedto establish a link with a main SATCOM base station; alternatively manpack/manpack links are possible provided here is a base station rebroadcast. Traffic facilities are either 50 baud duplex telegraph or analogue speech.