I was recently at a friend’s house who had just had a birthday. The room was strewn with cards, wrapping paper and a selection of presents. What do you think of the gifts, I asked, to which the reply was a so-so waving of the hand. She later said that she would probably “recycle” most of the presents and give them back as gifts to other people. And hasn’t that happened to us all?

Not only is it the extraordinarily non-environmentally friendly wastage of paper, cards and packaging, but it’s the fact that most of the gifts will be consumed or disposed of in a short space of time. This is where a SentForever personal message really stands out.

The Certificate of Transmission of the message is mounted in an elegant presentation card and delivered in a very stylish envelope. It serves as both the card and the gift and does not require any wrapping paper. It also contains your own very personal message as opposed to an off-the-shelf verse – a message that will exist for the rest of eternity.

Even if the message is sent as a card, our research shows that the majority of people who receive their message perceive it more as a gift and not as a card.

So if you want to send someone special a very unusual gift, then a SentForever message is perfect for you.

So if I send a message with SentForever, which direction does my message travel in? Good question.

We use a communications satellite dish based at BT’s Goonhilly earth satellite station in Cornwall UK. Now, communications satellite dishes are different from the radio telescope dishes used by the radio astronomers (such as the big dish at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire).

The astronomers are trying to listen to distant signals from far away stars – just like Jodie Foster in the film Contact. Because the Earth rotates, they have to keep the dish moving slightly to ensure that it stays on target. Obviously, they can only receive signals when the source is visible to the dish. They can’t receive signals when the source is below the horizon for example. This slow movement is called tracking.

Communications dishes don’t need to track a distant object as they are normally pointing at a fixed point in the sky to transmit or receive signals from a satellite in orbit. These dishes are capable of moving as sometimes they are repositioned to look at a different satellite in a different part of the sky. But they aren’t continuously tracking – they are effectively stationary.

When you send a Premium message with SentForever, you receive a Certificate of Transmission which includes the azimuth and elevation of your messages transmission. The azimuth is the compass direction and the azimuth setting of the SentForever dish means we are transmitting approximately South East out of Cornwall over France and the Mediterranean.

The elevation is the angle above the horizon, and the SentForever dish transmits at am elevation of 20.7 degrees above the horizon.

So that’s the direction of the message – but what’s the destination? Answer – eternity, as your message travels forever!