Raleigh company sets up satellite offices for Poles.

• Position: Microspace Communications Corp.

Raleigh company sets up satellite offices for Poles

Call it a goodwill gesture. Call it the world's highest lending library. Call it the Anglo-Polish Medical Information Retrieval Service.

Raleigh-based Microspace Communications Corp., a 1988 start-up specializing in transmitting data by satellite, is beaming information from London's British Medical Association Library to Warsaw's central medical library - via Raleigh.

"As crazy as it sounds, it's easier and more cost-effective to do it out of the U.S. than Europe," says Steve Grissom, vice president of a Capitol Broadcasting Co. division that transmits everything from stock quotations to background music.

Here's how it works: When a doctor at one of 22 Polish medical centers needs information, he telephones the request to London. There, the information is retrieved and sent by undersea cable to Raleigh. From Raleigh, it is beamed to Microspace's transponder aboard a Panamsat satellite parked 22,300 miles above the equator. A satellite dish in Poland catches the signal and relays it to a fax machine.

Microspace serves as middleman because...