I'd like to see the 100 kHz bandwidth limit on 70cm deleted. If you can legally send 6 MHz wide analog ATV on 70cm, why should there be a limit for data? This would avoid the ambiguity of digital television on 70cm (is it video or data?).
There is already the long-existing rule: 'hams must use the minimum bandwidth necessary' for communications. That rule is still in effect and will not be changed by this FCC rulemaking. FCC RULE: ยง97.307 Emission standards. (a) No amateur station transmission shall occupy more bandwidth than necessary for the information rate and emission type being transmitted, in accordance with good amateur practice. With the trend toward very fast communications that can contain a lot of message, with a short time spectrum footprint, it could lead to even better sharing than the antiquated frequency-based separation of the 20th century model. The HF bands are not always crowded... for example: We are in the bottom of the solar cycle, and it is night here. I'm tuning around 15 meters right now and there's not a signal I can copy here. Would it bother anyone if I used the whole digi sub-band segment at 100 watts for 10 seconds to send an emcomm spreadsheet message on groundwave to a station 20 miles away? No. Beginning in the 1980's, as a cellphone design engineer, I watched the evolution of cellular phone technology... we once used conventional FM for it. It evolved, and now we use various forms of Time-Division, Code-Division, and combinations of various time-interval modes. That innovation has vastly increased the number of signals that share the same spectrum. The same revolution is happening in a similar way to HF, for commercial and governmental radio services outside the ham bands; and it will eventually happen to hams on HF. It is just a matter of whether Ham Radio will help to lead this technological revolution, keep up with it, or if we will be led kicking and dragging our feet into the RF techniques of the 21st century FCC concluded that the antiquated symbol rate rule should be eliminated. FCC also concluded there should be no new finite bandwidth limitations. I fully agree with FCC's conclusions. We need to support FCC's "no finite bandwidth limit" because it keeps Ham Radio open to development of new radio techniques and systems. On the horizon, we can now see some of those new radio techniques which looked nearly impossible to implement 25 years ago.
It is just a matter of whether Ham Radio will help to lead this technological revolution, keep up with it, or be dragged kicking and screaming into the RF techniques of the 21st century.
It's best to keep a futuristic mindset when making comments/request to the FCC. The league filed a request (their proposal) in October 2013. 3 years later we have this reply from the FCC. So maybe (best case) in another 3 we will have actual rules changed. Technology moves faster than regulation.
Just in time for Christmas 2018, the RM-11708 radio. It's a small sealed black box with only 3 connections, power, USB "C", antenna, all bands all modes. It's all software driven with optional buttons on the box for those that need it, one says 'send mail' and the other says 'dial callsign'. No audio needed 'cuz the bands are never busy and you don't want to listen to the email connects anyway and the nasty chirping from the 'dial callsign' isn't much better. All driven from your PC or you can get the optional touch display panel to go mobile, it's available at any smart phone store today. Oh and the final option is a GPS that will randomly give you 10km errors because you should know where you're going and how to get there, in other words hang up the damn phone and drive. I think that's enough sacred cows for this episode, tune in tomorrow for the new name for the AWRL.......
... or you can sit in your garage, wearing your flannel shirt and call-sign ball-cap, surrounded by unused year and useless wallpaper, checking into roll-call nets, doing the same things you've been doing for 20 years. Or you could become excited about learning something new, and experience challenges you wouldn't get as a anti-tech curmudgeon. I mean, come on, it ain't that hard to punch in a freq and push-to-talk, or click a couple pieces of metal together.... Easy easy easy... I figure those that complain most about a computer are the old farts who barely know how to use one.
After looking over the FCC's NPRM, I am pleased to see that they declined the ARRL's proposed 2.8 kHz bandwidth limit, but based bandwidth limitation on "good amateur practice". I doubt the Commission would have been very enthusiastic about trying to impose and enforce specific bandwidth limits on any mode inside the amateur bands in any case. Further expansion of specific enumerated bandwidth limits in Part 97 would set a bad precedent, and would limit amateurs' flexibility in experimentation and self-instruction in the radio art, one of the reasons I staunchly opposed the ARRL's defunct regulation-by-bandwidth petition, as well as the FCC's infamous Docket 20777 back in the early 70s. I could live with eliminating our overly-complex matrix of sub-bands and sub-sub bands, making all the HF bands more like 160m, except possibly re-purposing the 25 kHz Extra Class CW sub-bands at the bottom end of each band, into weak-signal /narrow bandwidth segments akin to the CW-only segments at the bottom ends of 6m and 2m, without the licence class restriction. Instead of imposing a specific bandwidth limit of 500 Hz, 1 kHz or whatever, a rule could be enacted that the necessary bandwidth of signals transmitted in that segment shall not exceed that of a traditional manual Morse CW signal. That would prevent SSB and other wide-band mode operators from wiping out the entire CW segment during contests, something that happens regularly on 160.
Before you trash someone's background it might be good to know a little something about it. I come from a field where there only constant was change and the product was high speed data delivery......something the ham bands in their entirety don't have the bandwidth to support. You want to play high speed data try fiber and I'll warn you the 'pipe' is never big enough for the load. Yup, I might seem a bit curmudgeonly but that's only because I know the realities of what the digital elite want to do to the ham bands. Right now we have modes where the operator can't be identified or the message read and this bunch of miscreants are trying to flood the bands with more outdated digital junk from the commercial and government spectrum. Virtually all of the modes being tossed around are only good for email type messaging and depend on a DEDICATED channel to function somewhat reliably and the RM-11708 supporters want to inflict this crap on the rest of the world, kinda kills point 97.1(e), you know the one about 'international goodwill'. The other thing I grow tired of hearing is the baud limit stifles innovation, what a load of BS. The limits above 10m are relaxed, go ahead blast away, those bands are underutilized anyway. There's plenty of development going on up there including microwave. It's also pretty damned arrogant to assume there's no development because the US has a speed limit, the rest of the world's ham population thank you for being a total jerk. By the way Pactor 4 is a German invention in case that fact escapes you it just hasn't been allowed to run amok on US allocations.....yet. Lots of new stuff coming out almost daily on HF and it's mostly narrow bandwidth. So far I'm more impressed with the JT modes than modes consuming large amounts of bandwidth on a finite resource to deliver some rather questionable content. Oh, by the way I build a lot of my own gear and repair the off the shelf stuff. By the tone of your note I would guess you're also a Linux evangelist as well as a wide band proponent but that's just a guess as the two seem to run together, I could be wrong. I never check into nets, most are useless wastes of time including the NTS voice nets that tell participants to send in traffic with Winlink and I don't meet the age and infirmity requirement for the 75m nets. Don't own a flannel shirt, any more assumptions on your part?
I have to admit to being very uncomfortable with the idea of no explicit bandwidth limit; part of using the bands is sharing. On the other hand, there are certain practical limits. The wider your signal, the less power/Hz your signal can have, since there is a maximum power limit. If someone were to occupy an entire band, it might be rather difficult to heat them, and very easy to transmit over them. An extremely wide band digital mode would probably sound like increased noise floor to a narrow band user. IMHO you are probably not going to see a 1.5 megabit per second signal occupying the entire 10 meter band, and if you did it would very quickly fall below the noise floor with only available power. With that said, it could be ugly if someone decided to try the experiment.... 73 Jon AF7TS
Are you uncomfortable with the current rules? There is no explicit bandwidth limit today and baud rate does not limit bandwidth. Here's an example of how baud rate is meaningless. The symbol rate of this SDR generated OFDM signal is 279 baud. It is 7.77 MHz wide.
I understand that under current rules there is no bandwidth limit. I felt that ditching the baud limit while adding a bandwidth limit was an improvement. -Jon
I THINK you meant to say. ' alluded to ' ..... Eluded means escape from or avoided ....... No biggie .... JB
Why is that an improvement Jon? You realize there are many modes out there that are wider than 2.8k? Someday we amateurs might get to use what the pros do. Limiting bandwidth is a handicap we'd have to just fix later.
