Mark, K6HX recently asked what people are thinking regarding the “looming spectrum crisis” and the various “spectrum inventory” acts that are currently winding their way through Congress. Mark and I seem to be more or less in agreement regarding what may be around the corner:
When we say that our “ham radio political leaders” should remain vigilant against possible spectrum reallocation, I think that we are shifting the responsibility (and in the future, likely the blame) to them, when the responsibility really lies with us. We as radio amateurs are simply not doing enough to justify our use of UHF+ spectrum. When we rely on political action committees to justify our use of this valuable public resource, we should be working hard to provide them with every possible justification that they can use. It isn’t Congress who is placing these frequencies in peril: it is our own inactivity which does so. If we lose 1.2GHz, or 220Mhz, or any of our other allocations, it will be because we frankly aren’t using them enough. If I thought that these frequencies could be effectively used to give Internet broadband to millions of underserved Americans, I’d have to say “take those frequencies, we will miss them, but we had our chance with them”.
Mark hits the nail right on the head with this statement. If we lose any bands it’s our own fault for lack of activity on them. While I don’t think 70cm (think PAVE PAWS) and below are in danger, everything else is fair game, and this includes my beloved 33cm. I am very much a “life begins at 50MHz” kind of amateur and I wish we would see more use of the GHz bands, especially 12cm (2.4GHz) but I realize that most Hams hardly venture above 148MHz, and 95% of the experimentation in the community is below 30MHz. What does this mean when the Feds come knocking on the ARRL’s door asking for spectrum?
Game Over Man! Game Over!
Amateur Radio, in its current state, cannot justify the spectrum it’s given. Period. Full Stop. No amount of wharrgarbling about public service or what kind of value we provide is going to change that. Go ahead and read the ARRL’s Frequency Allocation page and ask yourself how many bands you’ve used in the past week, month, or year. Heck, even go back five years. I bet that most of you have never gone above 2M. Anthony, K3NG, takes an even more dower view in the comments section which I have a hard time disagreeing with:
Even if we would start using these bands more, I’m not sure that would be enough to keep them from being reallocated, even if we could get 50% of our active amateurs on them. If we calculate how many bits/hertz are currently being used in our spectrum versus what would be used if reallocated, and perhaps even take it a step further to model the geographical aspects and frequency reuse, it’s hard to objectively argue against mobile wireless use of these bands. Unfortunately we’re not going to be able to depend on the classic defense based on emcomm use or experimentation; the potential public benefit is just too great…
So, the question is, what can we do? I think we have two options, both of which, if they happen, will cause lamentations the like we have never seen across QRZ and eHam.
#1 Roll over – This is obvious. We lose, they win their spectrum, and we’re further sidelined into obscurity. While I don’t think this will happen and I’m sure that many of you agree, there is a distinct chance that the FCC will make a power grab for the “greater good” and legislate some of our bands out of existence without giving us a second look. Why? Because the amount of people served by expanded wireless service is pretty much a “no brainer” kind of decision. Since everyone on the federal level is hopping on the “broadband for everyone” bandwagon, passing off this kind of action will easily pass the “public approval” sniff test.
#2 Play lets make a deal – We play the cards we’ve been given and we proactively start making plans to give up bands and if we see the writing on the wall, we proactively approach the FCC with options. While, yes, you are correct, this approach did not work out well for Neville Chamberlain (Please note, I am *not* comparing the FCC to Hitler) we might be able to salvage concessions that guarantee the future of the hobby and bands. Give up 1.25M, 23cm, and 3300-3500 MHz for a law or something to guarantee the rest of our spectrum? I’d be OK with that.
These are not going to be easy decisions that are forthcoming if the Feds start scrounging for spectrum. I am pretty sure we’re going to lose any battle that comes to it. I think we as a hobby need to start figuring out what we are going to do now rather then run around like chickens with our heads cut off when the tax man cometh.
The other obvious part to this is that we should also start pushing the use of more of our spectrum. Why am I not seeing the ARRL start pushing for simple 2.4GHz data projects? With the demise of packet radio beyond APRS and the HUGE FREAKING SWATH OF IPv4 ADDRESS SPACE we have why don’t we see a organized effort for creating low cost homebrew builds? Instead, the ARRL is focusing on 40M while the HSMM page is so old it has dust on it. Way to go ARRL.
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Flickr
FriendFeed
Who cares. I mean, that’s the surly way to say it, but it’s not far from the truth. Now that you have the digital mindset infiltrating just about every aspect of ham radio, you’re left with bands not used, bands not cared for, and in some cases, forgotten or even never known about. Do we need all the bands, or at least the bandwidth, that we have? Probably not. It’s nice to have enough HF bands that we can communicate during any type of atmospheric and solar condition, but aside from that, we don’t need anything else. If anything, we have created this problem for ourselves by favoring technology that makes it easy for the FCC to argue we don’t need anything else.
The cold, hard, truth is that hobbies make very little money compared to any commercial use that might come along, and that most definitely include ham radio. If we stick to our guns and wind up pissing off the wrong people, we could lose more than a few bands we don’t use anyway.
Posted by Andrew K8DJK on January 5th, 2010.
In the county where I live 70cm is used more than 2m and 1.25m is used daily by our EMCOMM Packet network and voice Hospital network at least monthly. We also have a lot of voice use on 1.25m by commuters.
I would like to try some of the other bands but have a learning curve to put togeather the equipment for the GHz bands.
We need more than the little information in chapter 14 of the handbook to get some of us going in these bands.
I am sure we will end up losing some of the bands. I don’t think HF is what they are looking for. I would hate to lose the 2300 to 2310MHz or 2390 to 2450MHz bands before I get a chance to play in them. I have been looking at a TX and RX board advertized in Nuts and Volts for 2.4GHz and would like to try and use them if I can find someone else locally interested in playing in that space.
Posted by Allen KE7IQQ on January 7th, 2010.
I don’t think we’ll lose 70cm for the same reason we can’t use it in southeastern MA and RI: PAVE PAWS. Government has an insanely expensive system there and they won’t want to change bands. I also don’t think 1.25M would be greatly sought after due to the relatively low amount of MHz it occupies. I think that if we’re going to lose bands, it will be 33cm and above.
Easiest way to get on 2.4GHz is to go on eBay and pick up an older WRT54G and start reading here: http://www.n5oom.org/hsmm/wrt54g.htm. Go and make that packet network look like a relic.
Posted by Ben Jackson on January 12th, 2010.