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 In this final part of the series, the Curmudgeon looks backwards (with just a little nostalgia) at the ARS of fifty years ago as a reference point for today’s Service and notes that, even then, it was not a perfect society. And he gazes into a well-clouded crystal ball and hazards a few guesses about its future. [...]  President Obama’s multi-billion-dollar proposal to give every home broadband access seems to be a campaign without a constituency. This is not the first time administration efforts seem guided by something other than a groundswell of consensus. The administration has directed that $7.2 billion in stimulus fund grants target the broadband upgrade effort, declaring that universal access [...]  This isn’t really news. President Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum on June 8, 2010 entitled Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution. This committed the federal government to find an available 500 MHz of federal and commercial spectrum over the next 10 years for reallocation to broadband. The President said that this spectrum will foster investment, economic growth and help create hundreds of thousands of jobs by meeting the “burgeoning demand” for mobile and fixed broadband, other “high-value uses” and benefits for other industries. Currently, wireless companies have about 534 megahertz allotted to them. That number will double in the next ten years, apparently. [...] In the previous post, the Curmudgeon looked at the first of the two major sociological changes that, in his opinion, have occurred in the Amateur Radio Service during the past fifty years: the “dumbing down” and “consumerization” of the ARS. In this post he examines the second major change. This other change, the Curmudgeon suggests, is the ascendency of ARS operators’ ego as a principal organizing force. It has changed the Service during the past half-century, and not for the better. There are several ways in which this trend manifests itself today. [...]  We reported in a previous post on the zombie satellite Galaxy 15 that went rogue on April 5th about the potential interference this “zombie satellite” could cause, at the time with AMC 11. This time, roughly 35,000 people in rural Alaska may experience problems caused by the zombie satellite. They may lose Internet access, long-distance phone service or both for periods of 90 minutes to as long as 5.5 hours between Wednesday August 11th and Saturday August 14th. [...] It’s not been the Curmudgeon’s intention to devote appreciable coverage to the Amateur Radio Service (ARS) in these blog postings. A majority (perhaps most) of today’s telecommunications professionals are no longer licensed hams, although in past decades they most likely would have been. However, two recent personal events again brought the ARS into focus. In the first, earlier this year the Curmudgeon (today an Amateur Extra Class licensee) celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of earning his first ARS license, which was the (former entry-level) Novice class ticket. The second event was receipt of a gift of some computer CD-ROMS containing sets of page image files for the historic 1930 through 1959 issues of QST Magazine (the principal ham journal, published by the American Radio Relay League). [...]  Comments are now closed on the FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to overhaul antenna-related rules, which covers Part 17 on construction, lighting, and marking. Comments were due by July 20th and the deadline for replies is August 19th. A lot of our readers and clients already own AM broadcast antennas or if you own any kind of antenna structure or are expecting to build one, hopefully you have already contacted the FCC and made your suggestions, as this opportunity does not come along often. [...] The US economy, juiced by the national popular culture, is about to commit another major telecommunications blunder! The title of this piece gives a clue to it. Since there is no way to stop or to prevent the developing blunder, it might be of some use at least to understand what we are doing. American consumers, [...]  Apparently believing the old Brylcreem advertising slogan “A Little Dab’ll Do Ya,” Canadian proponents of the digital audio broadcasting (DAB) technology relied on a few stations in major markets across the country to spread the word. It didn’t work. The Canadian Broadcast Corp. has announced it is shutting down DAB digital transmitters in Montreal, a possible [...] Within the developing utility Smart Grid universe, this time we’ll look at some special concerns about the customer-centric Advanced Metering Initiative area. Here the deck is stacked entirely against the consumer. First, the consumer will have to pay the costs for implementing the Initiative; in California alone, the costs just for replacing a significant portion [...] Last time we introduced the new buzzword term, the utility Smart Grid, provided a quick overview of the concept-undergoing-creation, and noted that doubts exist whether the utility industry can successfully implement it. Now let’s spend a little time examining those doubts as they relate to the utility-centric side of the Smart Grid effort. The first concern [...] The FCC requires that all 2600 MHz band BRS and EBS broadband licensees who would must demonstrate that they provide “substantial service” to actual customers no later than May 1, 2011. Failure to meet this requirement will result in forfeiture of the license and the licensee will be ineligible to regain it. Various “safe harbors” [...] There is a new “next great thing” concept now moving through the land, undergoing promotion in the popular press and probably destined to be a future concern (and cost burden) to the citizens of the United States. That term is “Smart Grid.” And it’s a term that would be much easier to deal [...]  Transmitters are the target of copper thieves once again, this time the target was a high-voltage television transmitter at KMBC in Kansas City. The copper thieves managed to temporarily knock KMBC off the air for some Kansas City viewers, but within an hour KMBC had switched to an auxiliary transmitter with less [...] The rogue Galaxy 15 satellite The Galaxy 15 satellite that was knocked out by a solar storm on April 5th (but is somehow still transmitting) has been slowly drifting towards the AMC 11 satellite and was expected to drift into the orbit of AMC 11 around May 23rd. Since these 2 satellites operate on the [...]  Some wildlife conservationists and communications industry members have reached an understanding about how to start giving migrating birds safer flights when they take wing in the vicinity of wireless and broadcast towers. In a memorandum submitted this month (May) to the Federal Communications Commission, the ad hoc group recommended the FCC develop interim standards on the [...]  Engineering consultant Richard Arsenault says the biggest problem for AM reception during the daytime “is no longer interference between stations”, as it was when the AM service was established decades ago. The former station owner and consulting engineer says the threat is now “interference from electronic devices and power lines”, [...]  Cisco recently performed an on-line survey about RF interference and Wi-Fi network usage with 600 participants from industries such as agriculture, education, arts, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and many others. 78% of companies now consider all or part of their wireless network to be mission critical. 54% of companies indicated that RF interference causes wireless network [...]  It is our experience that RF safety accountability and hazard avoidance is well established in the wireless communications sector. However, hazardous industrial RF is widely encountered in a wide variety of industry settings through all manner of process equipment and non-radio systems. Many of these systems are benign just out of the [...] It has become increasingly popular to install bi-directional amplifiers (BDA’s) and distributed antenna systems (DAS’s) to overcome problems of cellular and other wireless coverage within buildings. Properly engineered, and coordinated with the cell cos being retransmitted these can greatly help in overcoming building problems. However, these systems are readily available, and are increasingly being installed without [...] Who would have thought that oil wells could interfere with cell towers? Yet, in the bizarre world of RF interference – it happened! The FCC Los Angeles Office received a complaint of interference to the reception of Sprint cell towers in Long Beach, [...] As everyone knows, the FCC has released a draft of their National Broadband Plan. Whoopee! They labored mightily, and they gave birth to a mouse. And probably a congenitally deformed mouse at that! At least in its outline form, the plan is what you might expect from a panel of LEPs (Lawyers, Economists, and Politicians) running [...]  We’re not used to freebies from the FCC, but they just offered up a broadband Speedchecker to see how your carrier is performing. Get it here. FCC Broadband Speedchecker Nothing’s really free from the FCC, of course. The Speedchecker is a Trojan horse. Before you can run it, you have to give up personal address information, [...]  The Spectrum Dashboard pulls from the FCC’s license databases and lets anyone browse the allocations table for licensed spectrum. Users can search FCC license records using a map interface, or search the records by common name – Verizon, for example – which greatly simplifies pulling together data by carrier. Determining who has radio frequency licenses in a given metropolitan area suddenly is [...] To make the LBA booth more accessible to our customers, we have moved from Booth# N516 in the North Hall to Booth# SU3327 on the upper level of the South Hall. Come see us!  Through collaboration between Artech House publishers and the IEEE Communications Society, a free web tutorial has been made available to wireless engineers. The tutorial will address a number of autonomous and intelligent techniques which can be applied to emerging high bandwidth systems to realize spectrum and network efficiency. It will address smart and effective design, including [...]  In response to the last blog posting, a San Diego Amateur radio operator kindly forwarded to the Curmudgeon the enclosed photograph and some of his observations of the monster residential ham antenna that set off the furor with the city government. The enclosed photo shows the situation on the ground there. For identification, this antenna [...] The Curmudgeon has received word about and has done a little investigating on an evolving issue. It’s the sort of thing that has to make you scratch your head and wonder just exactly where we have taken ourselves. It’s the kind of matter that causes you to feel a bit queasy inside. We’re back for the [...]  The Coast Guard says LORAN-C isn’t necessary for maritime navigation and the Department of Homeland Security says it’s not needed as a backup for GPS, so will shut down most of its system 0n 8 February 2010. That leaves pilots and other users very concerned about the lack of a land-based redundancy for GPS. Loran [...] |
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