I know for sure, that the regulators are actually measuring the spectrum occupancy of the VHF/UHF amateur bands, and in most countries it is very low. When the Swedish regulator did this in the Metro Stockholm area in 2015/16 the occupancy of the 2 m and 70 cm bands was "too low to accurately measure". 73/ Karl-Arne SM0AOM
Ed, This subject has been discussed at length two years ago. Because ham radio did and does such a poor job of justifying the 3.3. GHz band, it did not get sufficient number of 'friends' to assist in keeping a slice of it. You can check old QRZed posting--some, from me, going as far back as 2005--to see efforts and warnings on same. There is no interest in the 5.6 and 10 GHz bands at present stateside. Telecom interest is to leverage the C band spectrum. Maxing out C band is probably a 5+ year--maybe 10-- issue . Maybe more. The plan to use this 50 MHz have long since been public on ham media. This is not news. The 'news' is the date has now been set for it. 73 Chip W1YW
It will be gone by 2024. MM is not playing out. Wrong on 10 Gigs. It will have to be shown that C band is not enough. That is actually rather muddy.
I suggested a carve out of 20 MHz. You can see the posts on QRZed. What--2019?When I pointed out that initiative to telecom 'friends', they said: we can't support this unless the amateur community shows its own support. That didn't happen. Instead all the ham users pointed out how vital their own scattered (frequency) efforts were, that made no sense to anyone else. So we shouldn't bitch about loss of spectrum we did a POOR job of justifying. Maybe ARDC will take up the cause. I'm out. Life is too short. The bigger issue will be loss of HF spectrum due to 'consolidation' to small whiffs of frequency from digital, and general lack of use. You will see that, internationally, in the next 5 years. Sooner than you think. HF will be used for low bit rate mesh of robotic control of installed infrastructure. Among other things. Lack of backup via ham radio in Tonga is a warning sign that we have been dealt out. We can no longer say:'when all else fails...ham radio".
Hmmmm, I guess that works out to about one million for each licensed Ham and let the FCC keep the rest as a gratuity.
70cm is next, been saying this for years. It's just not widely used in rural areas enough, and great for long-range 4G-esque speeds with the right bandwidth... Our FCC mandate of symbol rate on our bands severely limits the usefulness of 70CM to simple APRS and Packet stuff for data. How does one send multimedia over 70cm for Scientific, S&R, or other EMCOMM purposes? Why the ridiculous data cap? OK, you can suck up 6Mhz worth of bandwidth for ATV though... perplexes me to no end. In other parts of the world, up to 512 kbaud is permissible. In the US, what is it, 56 kbaud? Yay, way to go, FCC.
Lets take the $9B, and give to the Hams...The total of Ham Operators in the world is about $3m..., So if we divide 9B into 3M, that would get each Ham operator about $ 3000 Not bad, I was eying up that FDX 101....This is one way of getting one! What do you all think? DE NN2X / Tom
On our local mesh network which uses modified 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz WiFi equipment, there are just over 200 nodes and 400 something devices all interlinked, some of the links are solely RF with beams and everything.
Low/medium bit rate meshing is certainly an understated effort of innovation in Part 97. It needs to get better PR and a snappy 'raison d'etre' elevator pitch for explaining to those outside of ham radio. IOW: why does anyone need this? What clever advantages have hams worked out? Hams are at the forefront of meshing and no one even knows it (basically).
Well, the mesh can get speeds of over 50 Mbps, which is faster than our personal wifi here at home... also you can access the internet through the mesh so as long as you have a computer and a battery to run it and a mesh node, you can connect to the internet even if your power at your house goes out. Other than that, yes I agree the microwave bands are way underused. He said 500 MHz of space? Think of all that could be done! Seriously, we need to start thinking of a use for these bands...
