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Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account Create an account to access more content and features on IEEE Spectrum, including the ability to save articles to read later, download Spectrum Collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. For more exclusive content and features, consider Joining IEEE. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN Telecommunications Type Feature Topic The Uncertain Future of Ham Radio Software-defined radio and cheap hardware are shaking up a hobby long associated with engineering Julianne Pepitone 10 Jul 2020 11 min read Ham radio operator Sterling Mann (N0SSC) Photo: Sterling Mann John Anderson, AJ7M, from Marysville, Washington enjoyed getting on the air from home for 2020 ARRL Field Day event, held June 27-28. Field Day is ham radio\u2019s largest on-air annual event and demonstration. John Anderson (AJ7M), from Marysville, Washington on the air from home for the 2020 ARRL Field Day event, held June 27-28. Field Day is ham radio's largest on-air annual event and demonstration. Photo: John Anderson Will the amateur airwaves fall silent? Since the dawn of radio, amateur operators--hams--have transmitted on tenaciously guarded slices of spectrum. Electronic engineering has benefited tremendously from their activity, from the level of the individual engineer to the entire field. But the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, with its ability to easily connect billions of people, captured the attention of many potential hams. Now, with time taking its toll on the ranks of operators, new technologies offer opportunities to revitalize amateur radio, even if in a form that previous generations might not recognize. The number of U.S. amateur licenses has held at an anemic 1 percent annual growth for the past few years, with about 7,000 new licensees added every year for a total of 755,430 in 2018. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission doesn't track demographic data of operators, but anecdotally, white men in their 60s and 70s make up much of the population. As these baby boomers age out, the fear is that there are too few young people to sustain the hobby. "It's the $60,000 question: How do we get the kids involved?" says Howard Michel, former CEO of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). (Since speaking with IEEE Spectrum, Michel has left the ARRL. A permanent replacement has not yet been appointed.) This question of how to attract younger operators also reveals deep divides in the ham community about the future of amateur radio. Like any large population, ham enthusiasts are no monolith; their opinions and outlooks on the decades to come vary widely. And emerging digital technologies are exacerbating these divides: Some hams see them as the future of amateur radio, while others grouse that they are eviscerating some of the best things about it. No matter where they land on these battle lines, however, everyone understands one fact. The world is changing; the amount of spectrum is not. And it will be hard to argue that spectrum reserved for amateur use and experimentation should not be sold off to commercial users if hardly any amateurs are taking advantage of it. Before we look to the future, let's examine the current state of play. In the United States, the ARRL, as the national association for hams, is at the forefront, and with more than 160,000 members it is the largest group of radio amateurs in the world. The 106-year-old organization offers educational courses for hams; holds contests where operators compete on the basis of, say, making the most long-distance contacts in 48 hours; trains emergency communicators for disasters; lobbies to protect amateur radio's spectrum allocation; and more. Former ARRL CEO Howard Michel at headquarters station, W1AW. Former ARRL CEO Howard Michel (WB2ITX) at headquarters station, W1AW. Photo: ARRL Michel led the ARRL between October 2018 and January 2020, and he fits easily the profile of the "average" American ham: The 66-year-old from Dartmouth, Mass., credits his career in electrical and computer engineering to an early interest in amateur radio. He received his call sign, WB2ITX, 50 years ago and has loved the hobby ever since. "When our president goes around to speak to groups, he'll ask, 'How many people here are under 20 [years old]?' In a group of 100 people, he might get one raising their hand," Michel says. members from the LASA High School Amateur Radio Club, K5LBJ, in Austin, Texas participated in School Club Roundup, and twice-yearly on-air event that encourages participation from ham radio school groups. Members from the LASA High School Amateur Radio Club, K5LBJ, in Austin, Texas participated in School Club Roundup, a twice-yearly on-air event that encourages participation from ham radio school groups. Photo: Ronny Risinger (KC5EES) ARRL does sponsor some child-centric activities. The group runs twice-annual Kids Day events, fosters contacts with school clubs across the country, and publishes resources for teachers to lead radio-centric classroom activities. But Michel readily admits "we don't have the resources to go out to middle schools"--which are key for piquing children's interest. We need to "convince them there's more than getting licensed and putting a radio in your drawer and waiting for the end of the world." Sustained interest is essential because potential hams must clear a particular barrier before they can take to the airwaves: a licensing exam. Licensing requirements vary--in the United States no license is required to listen to ham radio signals--but every country requires operators to demonstrate some technical knowledge and an understanding of the relevant regulations before they can get a registered call sign and begin transmitting. For those younger people who are drawn to ham radio, up to those in their 30s and 40s, the primary motivating factor is different from that of their predecessors. With the Internet and social media services like WhatsApp and Facebook, they don't need a transceiver to talk with someone halfway around the world (a big attraction in the days before email and cheap long-distance phone calls). Instead, many are interested in the capacity for public service, such as providing communications in the wake of a disaster, or event comms for activities like city marathons. "There's something about this post-9/11 group, having grown up with technology and having seen the impact of climate change," Michel says. "They see how fragile cellphone infrastructure can be. What we need to do is convince them there's more than getting licensed and putting a radio in your drawer and waiting for the end of the world." New Frontiers Dhruv Rebba (KC9ZJX) with his ham radio set up Dhruv Rebba (KC9ZJX) with memorabilia from his ham radio contact with astronaut Joe Acaba (KE5DAR) onboard the International Space Station. Photo: Sateesh Nallamothu The future lies in operators like Dhruv Rebba (KC9ZJX), who won Amateur Radio Newsline's 2019 Young Ham of the Year award. He's the 15-year-old son of immigrants from India and a sophomore at Normal Community High School in Illinois, where he also runs varsity cross-country and is active in the Future Business Leaders of America and robotics clubs. And he's most interested in using amateur radio bands to communicate with astronauts in space. Rebba earned his technician class license when he was 9, after having visited the annual Dayton Hamvention with his father. (In the United States, there are currently three levels of amateur radio license, issued after completing a written exam for each--technician, general, and extra. Higher levels give operators access to more radio spectrum.) "My dad had kind of just brought me along, but then I saw all the booths and the stalls and the Morse code, and I thought it was really cool," Rebba says. "It was something my friends weren't doing." He joined the Central Illinois Radio Club of Bloomington, experimented with making radio contacts, participated in ARRL's annual Field Days, and volunteered at the communications booths at local races. "We want to be making an impact... The hobby aspect is great, but a lot of my friends would argue it's quite easy to talk to people overseas with texting and everything, so it's kind of lost its magic." But then Rebba found a way to combine ham radio with his passion for space: He learned about the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program, managed by an international consortium of amateur radio organizations, which allows students to apply to speak directly with crew members onboard the ISS. (There is also an automated digital transponder on the ISS that allows hams to ping the station as it orbits.) Rebba rallied his principal, science teacher, and classmates at Chiddix Junior High, and on 23 October 2017, they made contact with astronaut Joe Acaba (KE5DAR). For Rebba, who served as lead control operator, it was a crystallizing moment. "The younger generation would be more interested in emergency communications and the space aspect, I think. We want to be making an impact," Rebba says. "The hobby aspect is great, but a lot of my friends would argue it's quite easy to talk to people overseas with texting and everything, so it's kind of lost its magic." That statement might break the hearts of some of the more experienced hams recalling their tinkering time in their childhood basements. But some older operators welcome the change. Take Bob Heil (K9EID), the famed sound engineer who created touring systems and audio equipment for acts including the Who, the Grateful Dead, and Peter Frampton. His company Heil Sound, in Fairview Heights, Ill., also manufactures amateur radio technology. "I'd say wake up and smell the roses and see what ham radio is doing for emergencies!" Heil says cheerfully. "Dhruv and all of these kids are doing incredible things. They love that they can plug a kit the size of a cigar box into a computer and the screen becomes a ham radio.... It's all getting mixed together and it's wonderful." But there are other hams who think that the amateur radio community needs to be much more actively courting change if it is to survive. Sterling Mann (N0SSC), himself a millennial at age 27, wrote on his blog that "Millennials Are Killing Ham Radio." Sterling Mann with his ham radio setup Sterling Mann (N0SSC) is advocating that ham radio shift away from a focus on person-to-person contacts. Photo: Sterling Mann It's a clickbait title, Mann admits: His blog post focuses on the challenge of balancing support for the dominant, graying ham population while pulling in younger people too. "The target demographic of every single amateur radio show, podcast, club, media outlet, society, magazine, livestream, or otherwise, is not young people," he wrote. To capture the interest of young people, he urges that ham radio give up its century-long focus on person-to-person contacts in favor of activities where human to machine, or machine to machine, communication is the focus. These differing interests are manifesting in something of an analog-to-digital technological divide. As Spectrum reported in July 2019, one of the key debates in ham radio is its main function in the future: Is it a social hobby? A utility to deliver data traffic? And who gets to decide? Those questions have no definitive or immediate answers, but they cut to the core of the future of ham radio. Loring Kutchins, president of the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation, Inc. (ARSFi)--which funds and guides the "global radio email" system Winlink--says the divide between hobbyists and utilitarians seems to come down to age. "Ham radio is really a social hobby...Here in Mississippi, you get to 5 or 6 o' clock and you have a big network going on and on--some of them are half-drunk chattin' with you." "Younger people who have come along tend to see amateur radio as a service, as it's defined by FCC rules, which outline the purpose of amateur radio--especially as it relates to emergency operations," Kutchins (W3QA) told Spectrum last year. Kutchins, 68, expanded on the theme in a recent interview: "The people of my era will be gone--the people who got into it when it was magic to tune into Radio Moscow. But Grandpa's ham radio set isn't that big a deal compared to today's technology. That doesn't have to be sad. That's normal." Gramps' radios are certainly still around, however. "Ham radio is really a social hobby, or it has been a very social hobby--the rag-chewing has historically been the big part of it," says Martin F. Jue (K5FLU), founder of radio accessories maker MFJ Enterprises, in Starkville, Miss. "Here in Mississippi, you get to 5 or 6 o' clock and you have a big network going on and on--some of them are half-drunk chattin' with you. It's a social group, and they won't even talk to you unless you're in the group." Martin F. Jue (K5FLU) Martin F. Jue (K5FLU), founder of well-known radio accessories maker MFJ, is developing new products to accommodate the shift towards digital radio communications in the amateur bands. Photo: Richard Stubbs "It'll all be digital at some point, right at the antenna all the way until it becomes audio." But Jue, 76, notes the ham radio space has fragmented significantly beyond rag-chewing and DXing (making very long-distance contacts), and he credits the shift to digital. That's where MFJ has moved with its antenna-heavy catalog of products. "Ham radio is connected to the Internet now, where with a simple inexpensive handheld walkie-talkie and through the repeater systems connected to the Internet, you're set to go," he says. "You don't need a HF [high-frequency] radio with a huge antenna to talk to people anywhere in the world." To that end, last year MFJ unveiled the RigPi Station Server: a control system made up of a Raspberry Pi paired with open-source software that allows operators to control radios remotely from their iPhones or Web browser. "Some folks can't put up an antenna, but that doesn't matter anymore because they can use somebody else's radio through these RigPis," Jue says. He's careful to note the RigPi concept isn't plug and play--"you still need to know something about networking, how to open up a port"--but he sees the space evolving along similar lines. "It's all going more and more toward digital modes," Jue says. "In terms of equipment I think it'll all be digital at some point, right at the antenna all the way until it becomes audio." The Signal From Overseas China's advancing technology and growing middle class, with disposable income, has led to a "dramatic" increase in operators. Outside the United States, there are some notable bright spots, according to Dave Sumner (K1ZZ), secretary of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU). This collective of national amateur radio associations around the globe represents hams' interests to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialized United Nations agency that allocates and manages spectrum. In fact, in China, Indonesia, and Thailand, amateur radio is positively booming, Sumner says. China's advancing technology and growing middle class, with disposable income, has led to a "dramatic" increase in operators, Sumner says. Indonesia is subject to natural disasters as an island nation, spurring interest in emergency communication, and its president is a licensed operator. Trends in Thailand are less clear, Sumner says, but he believes here, too, that a desire to build community response teams is driving curiosity about ham radio. "So," Sumner says, "you have to be careful not to subscribe to the notion that it's all collapsing everywhere." China is also changing the game in other ways, putting cheap radios on the market. A few years ago, an entry-level handheld UHF/VHF radio cost around US $100. Now, thanks to Chinese manufacturers like Baofeng, you can get one for under $25. HF radios are changing, too, with the rise of software-defined radio. "It's the low-cost radios that have changed ham radio and the future thereof, and will continue to do so," says Jeff Crispino, CEO of Nooelec, a company in Wheatfield, N.Y., that makes test equipment and software-defined radios, where demodulating a signal is done in code, not hardwired electronics. "SDR was originally primarily for military operations because they were the only ones who could afford it, but over the past 10 years, this stuff has trickled down to become $20 if you want." Activities like plane and boat tracking, and weather satellite communication, were "unheard of with analog" but are made much easier with SDR equipment, Crispino says. Nooelec often hears from customers about how they're leveraging the company's products. For example, about 120 members from the group Space Australia to collect data from the Milky Way as a community project. They are using an SDR and a low-noise amplifier from Nooelec with a homemade horn antenna to detect the radio signal from interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas. "We will develop products from that feedback loop--like for hydrogen line detection, we've developed accessories for that so you can tap into astronomical events with a $20 device and a $30 accessory," Crispino says. Looking ahead, the Nooelec team has been talking about how to "flatten the learning curve" and lower the bar to entry, so that the average user--not only the technically adept--can explore and develop their own novel projects within the world of ham radio. "It is an increasingly fragmented space," Crispino says. "But I don't think that has negative connotations. When you can pull in totally unique perspectives, you get unique applications. We certainly haven't thought of it all yet." The ham universe is affected by the world around it--by culture, by technology, by climate change, by the emergence of a new generation. And amateur radio enthusiasts are a varied and vibrant community of millions of operators, new and experienced and old and young, into robotics or chatting or contesting or emergency communications, excited or nervous or pessimistic or upbeat about what ham radio will look like decades from now. As Michel, the former ARRL CEO, puts it: "Every ham has [their] own perspective. What we've learned over the hundred-plus years is that there will always be these battles--AM modulation versus single-sideband modulation, whatever it may be. The technology evolves. And the marketplace will follow where the interests lie." About the Author Julianne Pepitone is a freelance technology, science, and business journalist and a frequent contributor to IEEE Spectrum. Her work has appeared in print, online, and on television outlets such as Popular Mechanics, CNN, and NBC News. From Your Site Articles * Build a Long-Distance Data Network Using Ham Radio - IEEE ... > * Is Ham Radio a Hobby, a Utility...or Both? A Battle Over Spectrum ... > * Cuba Jamming Ham Radio? Listen For Yourself - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * Amateur radio - Wikipedia > * What is Ham Radio > * Ham Radio Outlet > wireless tools and toys type:feature amateur radio software defined radio ham radio Julianne Pepitone Julianne Pepitone is a freelance journalist who reports via text, video, and television. She spent years on staff at CNN Business and then at NBC News, covering consumer tech, cybersecurity, and business. Now a freelancer, she works with an eclectic roster of clients. Beyond Spectrum, CNN, and NBC, her bylines can also be found at HGTV Magazine, Memorial Sloan Kettering, NYMag.com, Glassdoor, Popular Mechanics, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, Thrillist, MagnifyMoney, The Village Voice, and more. The Conversation (0) A small rectangular robot with large orange cartoon eyes on a construction site Type News Topic Robotics Video Friday: Dusty at Work 3h 3 min read Facebook thumbs-down hand on a iPhone. Telecommunications Type Analysis Topic Facebook's Vanishing Act Explained 07 Oct 2021 4 min read A dark haired woman wearing white pants and a blue shirt stands in the center. On either side are rows of machines with lights and green wires connecting them. Type Opinion Topic The Institute Making Information Tech Greener Can Help Address the Climate Crisis 07 Oct 2021 4 min read Type News Topic Robotics Autonomous Racing Drones Dodge Through Forests at 40 kph Training in simulation gives these drones impressive flying skills Evan Ackerman Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes. 07 Oct 2021 3 min read Animation of a colorful quadrotor drone flying around a tree in a snow-covered landscape drones robotics racing drones neural networks It seems inevitable that sooner or later, the performance of autonomous drones will surpass the performance of even the best human pilots. Usually things in robotics that seem inevitable happen later as opposed to sooner, but drone technology seems to be the exception to this. We've seen an astonishing amount of progress over the past few years, even to the extent of sophisticated autonomy making it into the hands of consumers at an affordable price. The cutting edge of drone research right now is putting drones with relatively simple onboard sensing and computing in situations that require fast and highly aggressive maneuvers. In a paper published yesterday in Science Robotics, roboticists from Davide Scaramuzza's Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich along with partners at Intel demonstrate a small, self-contained, fully autonomous drone that can aggressively fly through complex environments at speeds of up to 40kph. The trick here, to the extent that there's a trick, is that the drone performs a direct mapping of sensor input (from an Intel RealSense 435 stereo depth camera) to collision-free trajectories. Conventional obstacle avoidance involves first collecting sensor data; making a map based on that sensor data; and finally making a plan based on that map. This approach works perfectly fine as long as you're not concerned with getting all of that done quickly, but for a drone with limited onboard resources moving at high speed, it just takes too long. UZH's approach is instead to go straight from sensor input to trajectory output, which is much faster and allows the speed of the drone to increase substantially. The convolutional network that performs this sensor-to-trajectory mapping was trained entirely in simulation, which is cheaper and easier but (I would have to guess) less fun than letting actual drones hammer themselves against obstacles over and over until they figure things out. A simulated "expert" drone pilot that has access to a 3D point cloud, perfect state estimation, and computation that's not constrained by real-time requirements trains its own end-to-end policy, which is of course not achievable in real life. But then, the simulated system that will be operating under real-life constraints just learns in simulation to match the expert as closely as possible, which is how you get that expert-level performance in a way that can be taken out of simulation and transferred to a real drone without any adaptation or fine-tuning. The other big part of this is making that sim-to-real transition, which can be problematic because simulation doesn't always do a great job of simulating everything that happens in the world that can screw with a robot. But this method turns out to be very robust against motion blur, sensor noise, and other perception artifacts. The drone has successfully navigated through real world environments including snowy terrains, derailed trains, ruins, thick vegetation, and collapsed buildings. "While humans require years to train, the AI, leveraging high-performance simulators, can reach comparable navigation abilities much faster, basically overnight." -Antonio Loquercio, UZH This is not to say that the performance here is flawless--the system still has trouble with very low illumination conditions (because the cameras simply can't see), as well as similar vision challenges like dust, fog, glare, and transparent or reflective surfaces. The training also didn't include dynamic obstacles, although the researchers tell us that moving things shouldn't be a problem even now as long as their speed relative to the drone is negligible. Many of these problems could potentially be mitigated by using event cameras rather than traditional cameras, since faster sensors, especially ones tuned to detect motion, would be ideal for high speed drones. A colorful quadrotor drone flies through a forest The researchers tell us that their system does not (yet) surpass the performance of expert humans in these challenging environments: Analyzing their performance indicates that humans have a very rich and detailed understanding of their surroundings and are capable of planning and executing plans that span far in the future (our approach plans only one second into the future). Both are capabilities that today's autonomous systems still lack. We see our work as a stepping stone towards faster autonomous flight that is enabled by directly predicting collision-free trajectories from high-dimensional (noisy) sensory input. This is one of the things that is likely coming next, though--giving the drone the ability to learn and improve from real-world experience. Coupled with more capable sensors and always increasing computer power, pushing that flight envelope past 40 kph in complex environments seems like it's not just possible, but inevitable. From Your Site Articles * To Fly Solo, Racing Drones Have a Need for AI Speed Training ... > * JPL's AI-Powered Racing Drone Challenges Pro Human Pilot - IEEE ... > Related Articles Around the Web * Drone Racing League - YouTube > * The Drone Racing League > Keep Reading | Show less Aerospace Type News Topic FAA Fumbled Its Response To a Surge in GPS Jamming Confusion over stopping military tests had flight controllers fuming Mark Harris Mark Harris is an investigative science and technology reporter based in Seattle, with a particular interest in robotics, transportation, green technologies, and medical devices. 07 Oct 2021 3 min read Air traffic controllers in a control tower monitoring the airfield. EThamPhoto/Getty Images faa military gps jamming navigation air traffic control safety aerospace FAA air traffic controllers supervising flights over Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were confused and frustrated by an increase in military tests that interfered with GPS signals for civilian aircraft, public records show. In March and April this year, flight controllers at the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center filed reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), a forum where aviation professionals can anonymously share near misses and safety tips. The complaints accused the FAA of denying controllers permission to ask the military to cut short GPS tests adversely affecting commercial and private aircraft. These so-called "stop buzzer" (or "cease buzzer") requests are supposed to be made by pilots only when a safety-of-flight issue is encountered. "Aircraft are greatly affected by the GPS jamming and it's not taken seriously by management," reads one report. "We've been told we can't ask to stop jamming, and to just put everyone on headings." In a second report, a private jet made a wrong turn into restricted airspace over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico after being jammed. On that occasion, the air traffic controller called a stop buzzer. "[The] facility manager on duty later informed me we can't ask them to 'stop buzzer' and to just keep putting aircraft on headings," their ASRS report reads. Putting an aircraft on headings requires giving pilots precise bearings to follow, rather than letting them perform their own navigation using GPS or other technologies. This adds work for controllers, who are already very busy at certain times of day. "Busy traffic, bad rides, frequency congestion, then GPS jamming," reads one report. "Limit the length and what time of the day that facilities can GPS jam and have it taken seriously when we call and ask them to stop." "Give controllers the ability to have White Sands stop GPS jamming during high traffic periods," agrees the other. The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial. A Spectrum investigation earlier this year discovered that such jamming tests are far more prevalent than had previously been thought, possibly affecting thousands of civilian flights each year. The FAA does not share how many stop buzzer requests are made, but Spectrum's investigation obtained FAA data detailing four stop buzzers over the skies of California during a nine-week period in 2017. These included passenger jet flights operated by Frontier and Southwest. The White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), whose tests appear to have caused the GPS jamming in both recent complaints, estimates it receives "in the low single digits" of stop buzzer requests a year. A spokesperson for WSMR told Spectrum: "The US Army takes the safety of its operations extremely seriously. Calls for a cease buzzer are taken seriously and range control has not denied or ignored any cease buzzers. WSMR has also never requested or required any internal organization or outside agency to not make use of the cease buzzer in the event of an emergency, or unsafe event." The FAA provided the following statement: "The FAA cooperates with Department of Defense to mitigate the effects of the military's planned interference activities... to levels of acceptable risk. The primary mitigation when GPS is lost is for a pilot to use another means of navigation. Air Traffic Control (ATC) will assist the pilot with navigation on rare occasions, upon request. Should multiple pilots encounter problems, then ATC has the option to stop the underlying cause through [a] stop buzzer." When a stop buzzer call is made by a controller, the FAA then has a review process to analyze the appropriateness of the action and the associated operational risk. However, an FAA source also admitted that one ATC facility "expressed some confusion as to the scope of their authority to suspend operations using stop-buzzer protocols when GPS testing had ramped up significantly." The FAA now believes it has cleared up and abated those field concerns. Although flight controllers may no longer be instructed not to issue stop buzzer calls when planes are in trouble, pilots continue to experience difficulties in the airspace around White Sands. In May, the pilot of a light aircraft taking off at night in the Albuquerque area suddenly lost their GPS navigation and terrain warnings. Air traffic control told the pilot that WSMR was jamming, and instructed them to use other instruments. That pilot was ultimately able to land safely, but later submitted their own ASRS report: "Being unfamiliar with this area and possibly a different avionics configuration I feel my flight could have possibly ended as controlled flight into terrain." Such an outcome-a likely deadly crash-would surely not meet anyone's definition of "acceptable risk." From Your Site Articles * FAA Files Reveal a Surprising Threat to Airline Safety: the U.S. ... > * Will GPS Jamming Cause Future Shipping Accidents? - IEEE ... > Related Articles Around the Web * GPS chaos: How a $30 box can jam your life | New Scientist > * Information About GPS Jamming - GPS.gov > Keep Reading | Show less Telecommunications Whitepaper Emerging Trends in Wireless Infrastructure Emerging Trends in Wireless Infrastructure Rohde & Schwarz 10 Sep 2021 1 min read Rohde & Schwarz 4g 5g cloud rohde & schwarz type:whitepaper wireless This paper describes the emerging infrastructure trends of wireless networks for 4G, 5G, and beyond 5G. These trends provide even more opportunities to service providers for network deployments, network customization, and network optimization. These key trends include (i) spectrum trends, (ii) densification & coverage extension methods, (iii) virtualization and cloudification, and (iv) network customization and intelligence. 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