CPB Board hears troubling predictions [telecom]

By Dru Sefton, Current.org, December 10, 2013

| Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board members got an | ominous preview Monday of the corporation's upcoming white | paper about spectrum issues in public broadcasting. | | At a meeting at CPB's headquarters in Washington, D.C., Harry | Hawkes of Booz & Co.'s media and technology practice told | board members that if the FCC goes ahead with plans to clear | 120 MHz of spectrum for use by mobile devices, 110 to 130 | pubcasting stations will need to shift due to repacking even | if their operators don't participate in the auction. | | "That means that one-third of the system could have to change | channels," noted Vincent Curren, CPB's c.o.o. "This will | likely be more disruptive than the digital transition. This | will be a major undertaking for our industry over the next | several years."

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The FCC should have thought of this before the DTV conversion. Back then, they could have designed the allocations table that consolidated all stations in each city-of-license into half (or fewer) the number of analog channels.

Neal McLain

***** Moderator's Note *****

The real question is "What does a new DTV transmitter cost?", because the answer to /that/ question will tell us how much the PBS stations will push back, and thus how long it will be before the added bandwidth is available to mobile users.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
Neal McLain
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Lots. But most stations won't have to buy a new transmitter; they'll just have to have their existing transmitter retuned. And for many pubcasters, broadcast transmission is an afterthought, the price they pay for getting mandatory cable and satellite distribution, so they don't invest in their facilities any more than they have to. (Such is certainly the case for WGBH/WGBX here in Boston.) A much bigger expense is likely to be antenna system replacement: even for stations that are currently using a wideband antenna, repacking will almost certainly require changes in directional patterns, and requiring many currently omnidirectional stations to switch to directional antennas (which will lead to increased operational costs if two or more stations that now combine into a single aperture must now rent separate apertures on a tower).

The stations that will lose the most will be the ones currently on UHF who are forced to move to a VHF DTV channel, particularly if they end up on low-band where the power limits are so low and QRM is so high that they will be lucky to reach a small fraction of their over-the-air audience (as the current low-V DTV stations have found).

-GAWollman

Reply to
Garrett Wollman

The problem is that the FCC has no long-term plans for spectrum management. They just do whatever congress is pushing them to do this week, and congress does whatever the lobbyists are pushing them to do this week.

So a lot of stuff happens and then gets undone, or turns out not to have needed to have been done in the first place when the next thing happens. They're just thrashing their way from crisis to crisis rather than trying to travel in any particular direction.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Yeah, sort of like the snatch of the 2 or so MHz of 1.25m spectrum for UPS's little data netowrk, only for UPS to walk away from it for something better yet that spectrum hasn't been returned to amateur service.

Reply to
T

First, the background: Ham Radio operators used to have an allocation from 220 to 225 MHz, which is in the space just above the old TV allocation for channel 13. The "1-point-two-five meter" band actually runs from 1.37 meters to 1.33 meters, but ham bands are commonly referred to by the wavelength of a single frequency, sometimes for historical reasons. Most Amateur radio operators refer to the band as "Two twenty".

The 220 band never enjoyed the popularity of its neighbors at 2 meters (144 to 148 MHz), and 70 cm (420 to 450 MHz), because almost all the equipment used by early VHF enthusiasts had been converted to the ham bands from use in public safety, taxicab, commercial, and other uses, either in the "VHF High" band (152-172 MHz), or from the "UHF" bands (450-470 MHz). Since there was no commercial equipment for 220 MHz, hams had to do a lot of extra work to use it, and that meant that the band languished for years as a poor relative of the more popular bands on either side.

It wasn't until the onset of cheap, programmable commercial tran- sceivers caused commercial users to run out of room that the land mobile service cast its eyes on 220: some hams started "Use it or lose it" campaigns, but their voices were drowned out by the squacking of packet stations and other "digital" modes on both 2 meters and 70 cm, as well as new "repeater" stations in the formerly morribund 6 and ten-meter bands, all of which diverted the attention of hams away from a band they weren't using anyway.

When the cellular industry realized that it had a tiger by the tail, it quickly snapped up all available bandwidth, and when UPS realized that on-the-fly delivery tracking is an invaluable aid to managing a mobile workforce, the company lobbied for an assignment "anywhere else" but the cellular bands. The FCC gave UPS the first two megahertz of the 220 band, so that hams had a smaller allocation from 222 to 225, and were later awarded another megahertz, from 219 to 220.

Paradoxically, many hams have recently been introduced to 220 by buying low-cost hand-held units that are twins of those made for other bands, but the decrease in amateur digital activity which followed the widespread introduction of high-speed Internet connections has caused

220 to (once again) fade from view.

Ham radio is trying to redefine its role in the public mind, since Amateur Radio operators are no longer a major factor in emergency communications, and the ever-more-hungry mobile service providers are eyeing the ham bands as the next big thing. Stay tuned.

Bill, W1AC

Reply to
Bill Horne

Quoting Scott Dorsey:

This is a problem that will only get worse in the future as the demand for wireless spectrum continues to rise exponentially. Addressing this problem clearly requires technical expertise as well as legal expertise.

At least one FCC Commissioner -- Jessica Rosenworcel -- is making an effort to address this problem. At a recent speech at IEEE Globecom 2013 in Atlanta, she spoke of the need for additional wireless capacity. Although she didn't specifically mention television broadcast repacking, it's certainly an important part of the effort.

Rosenworcel concluded with the following:

| So here's an idea. Over the past several years, the FCC has | been able to recruit talented, young legal professionals | through an honors attorney program. In fact, one of the alumni | of this program is a young lawyer named David Goldman. He is | on my staff and here with me today. He is legal spectrum guru | of the first order and just the kind of professional we want | to recruit to public service. | | I think the program that brought David to the FCC needs an | engineering counterpart. So I think we should create an honors | program for young engineers. It would bring new vigor to the | ranks of our technical experts. By mixing young men -- and | women -- with experienced engineers already on staff, the FCC | could be better prepared to face the challenges of next | generation communications networks.

Maybe there's hope for the FCC yet.

A transcript of her speech is here:

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Her bio is here:

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Neal McLain

Reply to
Neal McLain

Indeed - but now at least you have the inexpensive Chinese radios that cover the band quite nicely. I picked up a 1.25m KST V6 for just $30. Of course my VX-7R does 1.25m but because of a spectral purity issue with the PA it's limited to 300mW of power.

Part of the problem for the mobile service providers is that when push comes to shove their networks simply don't work. That was amply demonstrated not so many month ago with the attack in Boston. People were saying they shut the cell networks down. The truth is the cell networks couldn't handle the traffic.

So there is still a role for amateur radio beyond the ragchew.

Plus local Emergency Management sort of has a use for us.

Reply to
T

The common carrier networks, i.e., the cellular networks, were never /intended/ to be a substitute for emergency communications. They get overloaded because they're not designed to handle mass-calling events, but even if that were not the case, we need to remember that landline phones weren't designed for it /either/.

A typical digital office is able to deliver dial tone to 50% of subscribers at the same time, but the call routing capability is nowhere near that number. Although some users (such as elected leaders, physicians, and shut-ins) are given priority obtaining dial-tone, the network was never designed for the prioritization and usurpation capabilities that are built-in to the military phone network.

I disagree: the current Incident Response System playbook lumps almost all radiomen into the same "communicator" category, which requires nothing more than an opposable thumb to use the push-to-talk switch. Ham operators, long accustomed to being guaranteed a place in EmCom just because it required equipment and skills not usually present in municipal networks, have found themselves bypassed by the very technologies that they helped to create, such as portable repeater stations, real-time geolocation reporting, and field-programmable radios.

I have written on this subject elsewhere, but it bears repeating: during most of the 20th century, Amateur Radio operators were a reserve corps of morse code operators that the military could put into service quickly if a war broke out. When morse code died, so did the hams' privileged position at frequency-allocation conferences.

If we Amateurs can't find different - and more effective - ways to justify the frequencies we enjoy, we're headed for a place next to spark transmitters and crystal receiving sets on the museum shelf of history.

Bill, W1AC

Reply to
Bill Horne

Same in NYC on 9/11, the Bay area after the Loma Prieta earthquake, etc. For very understandable financial reasons, the cell networks are built out to handle typical day-to-day loads, with some amount of surge demand. They don't do well when trying to handle 10x of their design load.

Same in my area (thanks to a lot of hard work and diplomacy by the city and county ARES/RACES officers).

One thing we've been able to do, is demonstrate that we can put quite a lot of "eyes out on the street" for early reporting after a disaster or incident (earthquake, bad storm moving in with flooding potential, etc.). We can gather and radio in a whole bunch of status information in the first 15-30 minutes and get it into the hands of the city and county emergency managers... long before they could free enough police or fire personnel to perform any sort of area-wide survey. We can tell 'em where there are serious problems, and where things are "OK for now", so they know where to commit their (limited and essential) official "first responder" resources.

And, we can do this even if the cellphone network is frotzed due to the (inevitable) everybody-tries-to-dial-at-once overload.

Some important parts of getting this to work and be used: regular training, regular practice, good organization, a cooperative attitude, and professional behavior... yes, we're "amateurs" (unpaid by definition, and in this case by law) but we have to behave with the sort of professionalism which convinces the paid first responders (and officials) that we aren't a bunch of insane loose-cannon radio cowboys but are people that they can depend upon.

Reply to
David Platt

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