Not only the same, but also older. The regulators are very aware of the current age distribution in amateur radio. "Letzte Mann macht das Licht aus!" 73/ Karl-Arne SM0AOM
Also, a large number of 5 GHz links are used for the extensive DMR system that RMHam built here to serve Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. I imagine there are many other such users on the band that aren’t generally known.
Congress. Your elected representatives. They passed the various Communications Acts, which created and empower the FCC. The whole spectrum auction thing is authorized by Congress as a way to keep taxes down. So...how would YOU determine who gets what frequencies? FCC
Well.... First I agree that we have to use these bands more. AND all the bands. If we stick to FT8 for Texpeditions we'll use smaller bandwidth and won't need so much. If we keep the repeaters on 2, 440, and 6 so quiet we won't need them. I kept listening for what our Lobby group was doing to help but all I hear is the crickets... Give them an inch and they always go for the money....Got to pay for the new trillions in the national debt......
At HF and the new sunspot cycle-- The bands have come back but the band use has not. Believe me, spectrum studies at HF are documenting this as we speak (I have nothing to do with it). Do you think they actually only check on weekends during contests? As for 9cm backbone-- Failure to work with other users to define a 20 MHz (or other) carveout was, IMO, a huge mistake. It ended up being a 'divide and be conquered' reality. We have lost 9cm entirely.
We should consider WHY. Just in the USA, we have about 780,000 licensed radio amateurs. Of those, a little less than half have General, Advanced or Extra licenses, which give access to all bands and modes at full power. (There are subbands on 80/75, 40, 20 and 15 meters that require an Extra, and a few that require and Advanced or Extra, but everything else is available to a General.) Listen to how crowded the HF bands are during a contest, and consider that even the biggest contests involve only a small percentage of licensees. Think about what they would sound like if, say, 10% of those licensed went on the air at the same time. People fo have jobs, school, etc. But your point is still valid. How many amateurs actually use any amateur band above 500 MHz? Particularly outside of a contest? 73 de Jim, N2EY
You never know what may become valuable in the future. As it turns out, the 3300 to 3450 MHz band overlaps the LTE/5G band. Unused repeaters could be repurposed into TDMA LTE or 5G nodes. Then your first radio is your phone (with a different SIM card). What if every kid in America found that appealing and the 3 GHz band became more popular than 20 meters? Being cavalier about spectrum that's worth $200 million per Megahertz seems insane to me.
OK: now it can be told... I used the 9cm band to develop and test ideas that led to a (now in allowance) patent on mesh networks using self powered 'sensors'. I originally called it the "Bigfoot network" with the potential application (as a spinoff) to produce a practical system to detect (heheh) Bigfoot and anything else that crawled into a 10 km-sq forest. But my original objective was to check to see who was eating my coax at the distant border of my NH property. (Take a guess at the answer Wifi and ISM proved not useful in this experiment. Now that experimental development, using Part 97, would never have even shown up on any 9cm 'data base'. But the rewards of then spinning off the ideas into other telecom regimes , from sats to IoT to telecom, may eventually prove (yet again) the 'value of the radio amateur in enhancing the radio art'. 73 Chip W1YW
Money talks, everyone. Best advice: Don't trust that the FCC will ever do right by amateur radio. History is, sadly, not on our side. And as pilot, I have lost confidence in the FCC's ability to protect passenger aircraft, let alone amateur radio.
Yeah, we aren't paying to use the space we have, so they think we're just a bunch of freeloaders. I do wish they paid more respect to us, though, because we kinda were the ones who found out how to use EM waves originally.
But what about your trust in us? We talk a loud game about supporting our fellow amateurs...but what are we supporting? Why are we supporting what we don't use? What do we need? Why do we need it? These are questions that the FCC has to address. When we don't provide compelling answers, others who want the ham band provide it for them, and you won't like the answers. So how would you expect the FCC to act given those realities? We can't just say: 'hey its us! don't forget us! don't go to the money pots!' We always have and will need to prove our worth. The FCC doesn't care about history. It cares about progress and needs. 73 Chip W1YW
