[HN Gopher] Commercial interests petition FCC for high power all...
___________________________________________________________________
Commercial interests petition FCC for high power allocation on
shortwave
Author : stolenmerch
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-07-13 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.arrl.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.arrl.org)
| LocalH wrote:
| > Because radio frequency signals travel faster in air than does
| light transmitted via fiber optic cable, use of the 2-25 MHz Band
| enables transmission with a shorter delay than fiber.
|
| wut
| cozzyd wrote:
| typical index of refraction in fiber is of order 1.5. Over 1000
| km, that's nearly 2 ms compared to n=1.
|
| Of course HF doesn't propagate "straight" so a direct
| comparison is not straightforward.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| The speed of light is different in an atmosphere, glass, a
| vacuum, etc.
| DropInIn wrote:
| Just a matter of time before the amateur spectrum is taken by
| corps, isn't it?
| gravypod wrote:
| In my opinion this is: 1) extremely likely to happen and 2)
| extremely avoidable. Right now there's no new blood replacing
| existing hams. The type of person who is into RF is also likely
| to be tech savvy these days. There are cool things you can do
| in ham with computers (ax.25, psk) but I've seen a lot of
| "that's boring come learn code to talk to people on field day"
| push back in most clubs.
|
| It is very sad. I have a feeling a new wave of hackers would
| flood radio if the community pushed for some spectrum to be
| community dedicated to digital comms.
|
| Outreach would be much easier.
|
| I've actually seen hams go on a >20 minute rant about how
| digital is ruining ham radio.
| signaturefish wrote:
| The thing is, there ARE chunks of spectrum dedicated to
| digital comms within the amateur radio bands.
|
| Here's a link to the VHF band plan we use here in the UK -
| obviously I can't speak for other countries:
| [https://rsgb.services/public/bandplans/19/ ]. It's
| _littered_ with SSTV, beacon and digital mode allocations
| (and for clarity, that's a good thing). The digital mode
| allocations are full of people chatting in text using FT-8 or
| JS8Call (more in HF than VHF, those, but the principle
| holds). On the next page, there's an entire 1MHz allocation
| dedicated to wideband digital data modes.
|
| If you're a licensee, there's plenty of innovation and
| digital experimentation space available. Sure, a chunk of the
| traditionalist ham community aren't excited about it, but
| there's plenty of us who are. And, as ever, you don't need a
| license to receive...
| nvy wrote:
| At least where I live, the vast majority of hams you
| encounter both in person and on the airwaves are grumpy aging
| boomers who are actively hostile to new people.
|
| Goodbye Amateur Radio, you won't be missed.
| dylan604 wrote:
| One day, your area will suffer a major disaster like
| earthquake, hurricane, etc that will knock out all of the
| cell towers and possibly even home internet access as well.
| We'll see how much you miss the HAMs then
| nvy wrote:
| Yep, that's the fetish these guys have. Old grouchy
| misanthrope in a Tilley hat becomes local hero during an
| earthquake.
| dylan604 wrote:
| and you sound exactly like the type of person that will
| be the first one crying to everyone that their wifi isn't
| working and they're missing some ridiculous TikTok time
| waste instead of helping out with the situation.
| [deleted]
| nvy wrote:
| How charming. Email is in my profile if you'd like to
| discuss this further.
| mlyle wrote:
| As a long time radio amateur, extra class, licensed since
| 1995: I don't really like the attitude. There's
| legitimate concerns about the longevity of the hobby. The
| average ARRL member is 68 years old. There's also a
| bigger and bigger disconnect between older operators and
| (the few) younger operators.
|
| Most of the hobby is not prepared to help with emcomm.
| And I think you (and a lot of people) overstate how
| helpful amateur emcomm is. In the past couple decades,
| local officials have gotten pretty good systems for
| getting high priority traffic out of the local area
| (which is what HF was previously for).
|
| Amateur volunteers relaying things in the local area are
| helpful in keeping disaster logistics running smoothly.
| Radio skills are not a big part of it, for the most part.
|
| I'm a teacher and passionate about radio. I don't know
| how to get my students into radio and make it into a good
| experience for them. They're way too likely to face
| hostility, racist political rants, etc. So I haven't
| pushed on it.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I'm a former HAM. And the "grumpy old-man" majority is
| what really turned me off of it when I was younger. I
| occasionally still use SDR to listen in to HF/whatever,
| and it seems like the "old-man" factor has only gotten
| worse. Last time I listened to the HF SSTV (it would have
| been in 2021 or 2022) channels I gave up after getting an
| anti-Hillary meme.
|
| As for emergency preparedness... No. Hams don't really
| play a role anymore. Satellite texting/Starlink, digital
| repeaters for agencies, generally available idiot-proof
| radios are all things that would have to fail. There's a
| reason that the volunteer SAR team near me just buy off
| the shelf stuff from Motorola instead of trying to
| recruit Hams. Even in some sort of failure like that, I
| would rather have an air band or marine band radio than a
| Ham radio.
| mlyle wrote:
| I think you overstate what I had originally argued.
|
| Our local CERT makes big use of amateur emcomm. But it's
| the non-critical stuff: neighborhood liasions to go out
| and spot things, or volunteers in a truck to relay supply
| needs at peripheral stations.
|
| It's a parallel line of communications (with a separate
| set of humans making a judgment of what's important to
| escalate), which is useful when administrative and
| decision-making capacity is constrained. And it has
| different failure modes, which is nice, too.
|
| Even little things: visible volunteer patrols by amateur
| operators for fireworks laws violations just helped my
| city tamp down the normal dozens of fires to only two and
| hastened the firefighting response.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I was just relaying my experience as a former teenage
| ham.
|
| As a counterpoint, I once was involved with a backcountry
| emergency where, at a certain point, it made sense to
| have a non licensed person on a radio. We actually had
| the local grump hop on and tie up the frequency
| chastising them for using the radio. That felt very in
| line with the ham community.
|
| Sure, Hams can provide utility in an emergency, but Hams
| also like to overstate just how essential they are in
| these situations (scroll up for evidence).
|
| Volunteer fire patrols are great and all, but an
| independent radio network for the volunteers is not
| exactly required, or even more useful than a cellphone.
| MandieD wrote:
| I'd encourage them to focus on the digital modes as a way
| to test the things they build and learn about
| propagation. The communities around digital modes also
| seem to be nicer and more diverse.
|
| There are still lots of old guys in these parts of the
| hobby, but ones open-minded enough at least to learn new
| things, and I've not had any issues with them despite
| having a distinctly female first name.
|
| WSPR is the best place to start, in my opinion - lots of
| results for really low capital investment (5W is _high_
| power), really lending itself to DIY.
| mlyle wrote:
| The one place I've gotten some slight traction is that we
| have a group of students building a satellite for
| eventual launch and operations. So they have deployed a
| satellite ground station, and have been taking line-scan
| photos of our region via NOAA satellites.
|
| Licensing is ultimately going to be important to
| transmit, etc.
|
| WSPR is amazing, but there's a certain "so what"-- I can
| send a packet over there, too, via the public internet.
| Radio doesn't make sense to kids anymore: like they
| really don't get it.
| ianburrell wrote:
| I'm a ham and train to use radios after earthquake. But
| ham radio is becoming less important for disasters. Any
| effort for ham radio would probably be better spent on
| making cell network more reliable.
|
| I would pull out satellite messenger to text people that
| I'm okay.
|
| I have thought about getting Starlink for internet but it
| is too expensive for just disasters. I'm hoping they come
| out with smaller, cheaper dish. But Starlink would be
| perfect for command posts. Or for city to setup
| communication centers for the public.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Can't wait for you to get older and start shaking your fist
| at the youngins who hate you for no discernable reason.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Anyone using words like boomers aren't worth listening to.
| You could have said the same thing without using slurs.
| This isn't Reddit.
| lolbert3 wrote:
| [dead]
| jimnotgym wrote:
| What does that matter? You don't need to talk to the hams
| where you live. Talk to the ones over the horizon!
| tarxvf wrote:
| There are many more young hams and much more experimentation
| and digital interests than many realize. They just aren't
| ARRL members, don't go to club meetings, etc. They are active
| on discord. But there's plenty of new blood and hacker-types
| - they just don't do the contests and nets and other
| 'classic' ham radio stuff.
|
| The curmudgeons are a minority, but a very vocal one.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Of course it's boring to people that have had smart devices
| since the day they were born. These people can talk to anyone
| any where on the planet at any time of the day. HAM allowed
| people to talk to others across the horizon since pre-WW
| times. That's like saying playing with 2 tin cans and a
| string is boring. Duh!
|
| >I've actually seen hams go on a >20 minute rant about how
| digital is ruining ham radio.
|
| Digital ruined a lot of things. Analog is/was just so much
| more open and ripe for hacking. Part of the advantage of
| digital was this security. However, going digital allowed us
| to do so much more, so it's a migration that could not be
| stopped.
|
| The only time HAMs are paid any attention are in times of
| disaster. Nobody will notice the loss of HAMs until the next
| major disaster near them, and then everyone will look around
| and ask "what happened to all the HAM guys?"
| ke88y wrote:
| _> The only time HAMs are paid any attention are in times
| of disaster. Nobody will notice the loss of HAMs until the
| next major disaster near them, and then everyone will look
| around and ask "what happened to all the HAM guys?"_
|
| It's true that the HAM clubs tend to put a cultural
| emphasis on emergency communications. But the primary value
| add is the community with its various memoranda and
| training/standardized way of handling emergency
| communications. The radio skill-set and equipment is more
| of a red herring, tbh.
|
| Even being tuned into the amateur radio community and
| living through several regional natural disasters that
| knocked out cell phone coverage, I've never actually seen
| HAM radio operators turn out to be useful in emergencies.
|
| I'm glad for the robustness provided by the HAM community,
| and I think allocating spectrum is a small price to pay for
| a set of volunteers who serve as yet another layer of
| "backup infrastructure". It's valuable to have that
| robustness.
|
| But tbh in an actual emergency or natural disaster I'd MUCH
| rather have my inReach mini than my hand-held. The HAM
| emergency communications narrative is vastly over-stated
| (and, honestly, self-important in a way that's off-putting
| to pretty much all non-HAMs).
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I really want to be interested in amateur radio but it
| doesn't seem useful for anything. Since encrypted traffic is
| forbidden it seems useless for any personal project where I
| care about confidentiality or integrity. That mostly seems to
| relegate it to "talk to other people who are far away" and I
| can use the Internet to do that already.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| Confidentiality isn't really part of ham radio. You must be
| licensed and maintain a semi-public call sign. Part of the
| fun is learning the physics and engineering of RF and
| antennas. Makings contacts thousands of miles away usually
| takes skill and know-how beyond just jumping online and
| talking with random people. There are a lot of factors such
| as understanding wave propagation in relation to the earth
| and ionosphere. It's satisfying to, say, take your little
| 5W HF radio and mobile antenna into a remote area and make
| contacts with other operators. There are also lots of other
| cool aspects such as having privileges to create higher-
| power mesh networks, etc. It's a technical hobby and not
| for everyone, but rewarding.
| livueta wrote:
| You're accurately describing the status quo, but I think
| the parent's point is that a lot more people, me
| included, would be interested in defending these
| frequency allocations as a public good if they were more
| practically usable, and practically usable directly
| implies encryption. It's an awful lot of primo bandwidth
| for a bit of hobbyist DXing.
|
| I think the problem comes down to the HAM rules having
| been formulated pre-Internet, where the distinction
| between amateur and commercial activity was a lot more
| obvious: noncommercial ~= useless, commercial ~= useful.
| The advent of the Internet demonstrated the existence of
| a whole new category: noncommercial ~= useful.
|
| Today we've got all kinds of noncommercial but highly
| useful RF applications, e.g. Meshtastic, that are stuck
| in the relatively limited ISM bands (yes, I'm aware of
| HAM mode, but recall usefulness - encryption). Just using
| the Internet isn't a replacement for these projects, as
| they're intended to be useful offgrid or during times of
| centralized Internet disruption. IMO it's a crying shame
| that stuff like this, the bleeding edge of non-commercial
| usefulness in RF, is lower priority than ragchewing.
| Besides, it's not as if all the technical aspects go away
| under looser rules: propagation behavior etc etc are just
| as important, if not moreso, than they ever were.
|
| This doesn't mean just hand it over to the corps; there's
| a third way. Some chunks of current HAM spectrum should
| be converted to ISM. That doesn't mean a total free-for-
| all; duty cycle and EIRP limits apply and can be scaled
| appropriately to the frequency's propagation
| characteristics. The degree of freedom in usage in ISM
| bands drives innovation in protocol design to make better
| use of available bandwidth, as has happened with 802.11,
| so congestion/commercial use is actually a good thing.
| [deleted]
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| Checksums, signatures, HMACs, &c are allowed over amateur
| radio; so integrity checks are allowed. You're not allowed
| to "obscure the meaning of the message", but that doesn't
| preclude integrity checks.
| teeray wrote:
| Legacy two-way radio is plagued by analog. FRS would be
| _vastly_ more useful to the average person if some digital
| comms were permitted. People want to be able to text each
| other in the woods, send coordinates, etc. and there's no
| technical reason why a digital FRS gateway (with meshing)
| couldn't exist. Obviously the no encryption rule would need
| to remain so people don't, for instance, use the whole
| allocation for more Wi-Fi channels.
| emptybits wrote:
| > People want to be able to text each other in the woods,
| send coordinates, etc.
|
| Small amounts of digital have been allowed in FRS for a
| while. But only one second, every 30 seconds. Creating a
| mesh within that constraint would be genius.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/95.587
|
| But sending GPS coords and short data bursts standalone or
| with phone app is a thing. e.g.
| https://baofengtech.com/new-release-btech-gmrs-pro/
| teeray wrote:
| TIL! Thanks for the info.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| > I've actually seen hams go on a >20 minute rant about how
| digital is ruining ham radio.
|
| Only 20 minutes? That's short for an RF guy rant! I used to
| work with ~20 mmWave guys. All older dudes, and MAN could
| they talk. There was one guy who's last name was "Park." We
| called it "getting Parked" when he would park his ass at your
| desk and prevent you from getting any work done for 1-2 hours
| at a time
| MandieD wrote:
| Pay attention to some of the projects being funded by the
| ARDC - Amateur Radio Digital Communications. They're on the
| lookout for people, especially younger people like school
| kids and college amateur radio clubs, doing new and
| interesting things with RF, which is really what the amateur
| bands were intended for.
|
| https://ardc.net
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Unfortunately, that's true at quite a few clubs, which are
| quickly shrinking in size. It probably wouldn't be difficult
| to stage a coup by having a dozen younger enthusiasts join
| and vote out the current membership, but it would be cleaner
| just to start up a separate club dedicated to digital modes.
| Younger potential members are more likely to congregate on a
| platform like Discord than join a local meatspace group so
| it's kind of moot.
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| My only experience with an amateur radio club:
|
| I studied to take my Technician Class exam, when I finished
| and passed, I found out I could take my General Class exam
| right then if I wished. When I took that second exam and
| failed, the club members looked absolutely delighted. I
| don't look like them, and their smiles felt like them
| saying "we knew the freak would fail". It felt incredibly
| alienating.
| threeio wrote:
| Thats a real shame... I've rightfully ignored all of the
| people who encouraged youth to join the hobby then
| shunned them for talking about topics that they weren't
| interested in or experimenting with different modes that
| they don't like... Ham radio has plenty of fantastic
| people in it, and like any other large group that tends
| to have its share of gatekeepers who believe we all
| should be able to copy morse at 45wpm in our heads.
|
| Shoot for the general again and use one of the online
| testing groups, simple and no judgement.
| MandieD wrote:
| HamStudy.org got me through the Technician and General,
| Anki-style. The website was free, the app was $4 (one-
| time purchase, includes all three levels, plus a few non-
| US exams).
|
| The volunteers proctoring all three of my online exams
| were anywhere from polite to actively cheering me on
| (before the exam), and all congratulated me when I
| passed.
| kawfey wrote:
| https://youthontheair.org
|
| i'm doing my part!
| bityard wrote:
| "Those youngsters are ruining ham radio for us!"
|
| "Those boomers are ruining ham radio for us!"
|
| It's the ciiiiiircle of life...
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The gap between analog and digital modes is big enough that
| maybe it doesn't make sense for them both to be in the same
| club. The FCC relies on the clubs for volunteer labor to
| conduct testing and monitoring rule adherence, both of
| which the older guys seem to do very well but perhaps
| licensing should have a base component for understanding
| the general FCC rules and basic radio theory and then have
| separate analog and digital endorsements.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| > The gap between analog and digital modes is big enough
| that maybe it doesn't make sense for them both to be in
| the same club.
|
| This makes absolutely no sense. There's a whole base of
| physics, experince, antenna design, &c that are shared
| between analog and digital modes. Truthfully much more is
| shared than is different -- after all, in the end,
| digital modes are just another analog mode transmission.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| And yet here we are, with the analog gatekeepers happily
| leading the hobby into oblivion.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Most of the RF hacking anymore is being done in ISM band with
| LORA and the like. The HAM industry is almost entirely
| catering towards boomers on expensive HF sets chewing the
| fat. I got my tech license a few years back and the free
| issue of the ARRL magazine I was sent had two retirees on the
| cover talking into expensive mics, seated in their lavish
| radio shacks. Yeah this hobby is not for hackers.
| emptybits wrote:
| 20,000 watts!? The industry's petition is here:
| https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1042840187330/1
|
| The petition requests "maximum transmitter power is 20,000 watts
| RMS" in the HF 2 - 25 MHz range. Wow. 20 kW is a LOT of power.
| Two amateurs in HF can talk to each other on opposite sides of
| the planet with 5 W and a tiny rig and a lot of skill. I think
| most amateurs would consider 100 W a lot of power for competent
| HF comms.
|
| But American industry wants 20,000 W for coast-to-coast jibber
| jabber? Greedy. Lazy. And pollution.
|
| The headline petitioners are: Eric Bellerive on
| behalf of DRW Holdings LLC Thomas Maxwell on behalf of
| IMC Trading John P. Madigan on behalf of NLN Holdings
| LLC Kevin Nielsen on behalf of County Information
| Services LLC, an affiliated company of Optiver Services
| B.V. Tom Proudley on behalf of Tower Research
| Capital LLC
| mlyle wrote:
| Throughput is proportional to bandwidth and is logarithmic with
| SNR (i.e. output power).
|
| All being equal, you'd rather they use a narrow signal with a
| lot of power than a wider one. The greedy/lazy/polluting way
| would be to demand a wide allocation so that you can use low
| power.
|
| Of course, a very loud signal right next to amateur allocations
| may mess with lower-quality receivers.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Why? 20 kW is very common for FM radio, which is also just
| streaming shitty ads to people. Warsaw had a 1 MW transmitter.
|
| Power density scales with inverse of distance squared. At 1km,
| 20 kW is 0.001 W/m2. At 500 km it's a few nW/m2.
| discretion22 wrote:
| The issue here is the frequency used plus power and spurious
| out of band emissions. 'FM Radio' (really 150KHz wide FM
| modulated 88-108Mhz) has propagation generally limited to
| line of sight, perhaps a few hundred miles at most due to
| earth curvature and the signals go off through the atmosphere
| into space so do not interfere with anything beyond the
| immediate range. FM also has good interference immunity due
| to the capture effect of FM signals so spurious emissions
| nearby are typically ignored.
|
| 2-25Mhz reflects off the atmosphere and returns to earth and
| the multiple allocated bands in the range are typically less
| then 6KHz for broadcast AM and other bands often <3KHz SSB
| down to 100Hz CW can be completely trashed with spurious
| emissions. 60, 80m and 160m can be difficult to use already
| due to all sorts of noise from notionally low power devices
| in the mW range on nearby, or sometimes nowhere near,
| frequencies. The wide range is probably to enable use
| regardless of the current maximum usable frequency (MUF) to
| ensure atmospheric reflection. MUF varies, sometimes
| considerably, by time of day, season etc. However the
| reflections do not stop when you receive the signal, they
| continue to skip and be received in many additional locations
| that are not the intended destination.
|
| Someone pumping 20KW across the range could cause an
| incredible amount of disruption, essentially worldwide. See
| Ringway Manchester's great series of videos on the Russian
| Woodpecker (it was speculated in the MW power range)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB_jiigRq-c
| xxpor wrote:
| FM is VHF, a completely different beast than HF.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Just wait for very high frequency trading firms to appear.
| [deleted]
| LinuxBender wrote:
| The military already uses 15KW in HF as a fallback to
| satellite. I maintained those old systems for a while. They've
| been doing this since WWII. There is chatter every day
| confirming communications to Air Force 1 and 2. We used
| Chirpsounder to see which freqs would be best that day.
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| It is a lot, but I think they want to be able to blast through
| difficult sunspot cycle activity.
|
| That's quite an electric bill, when you consider they're asking
| for up to 50 kHz bandwidth.
| mlyle wrote:
| > That's quite an electric bill, when you consider they're
| asking for up to 50 kHz bandwidth.
|
| Watts are watts, whether you spread them across 1 Hz or 1GHz.
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| I'm talking about the bandwidth of the individual signal. A
| 5 kHz wide signal uses a lot less electricity than a 50 kHz
| wide signal.
| mlyle wrote:
| The same output power is the same output power.
|
| In general, the _opposite_ of what you say is true: the
| more occupied bandwidth, the less power you need for
| equivalent information transfer. So, e.g. when the FCC
| made everyone doing VHF /UHF voice comms narrowband from
| 25KHz to 12.5KHz, you needed basically double the power
| for equivalent analog voice.
|
| Or for an extreme-- GPS uses 50MHz wide to send dozens of
| bits per second to allow much lower satellite output
| power and resilience to noise.
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| Are you saying that a transmitter with an output of
| 20,000 watts and a bandwidth of 50 kHz using digital
| modulation uses the same amount of electricity as a
| transmitter with 20,000 watts and a bandwidth of 1 kHz
| using digital modulation?
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes. Watts are the unit of power. Either of them would
| probably use 22,000-35,000 watts of electrical input
| power to produce an output radio signal of 20,000 watts.
|
| The former could be expected to transfer much more
| information, or alternatively to go further. (Or the
| former you could use less than 20,000 watts to get the
| same data transfer rate and range as the latter).
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| Thank you.
| Animats wrote:
| > But American industry wants 20,000 W for coast-to-coast
| jibber jabber?
|
| Chicago to New York, mostly. The derivatives markets are in
| Chicago and the cash markets are in New York. They've been
| testing at only 10Kb/s, and they're probably using forward
| error correction, which uses more bits. (Given the application,
| retransmission adds too much latency, so that's out.) 20KW
| would reduce the error rate.
| api wrote:
| I once read someone claiming that a paper study was done on
| the feasibility of drilling a small tunnel directly through
| the crust between Chicago and New York in a straight line to
| create an evacuated tunnel like a miniature hyperloop for
| light speed (in a vacuum) line of sight laser communication.
|
| I think the proposed technique was laser or microwave
| vaporization tunneling at a small diameter.
|
| Something tells me it was too expensive.
|
| HFT is psychotic.
| alpark3 wrote:
| It's worth noting NLN Holdings is a joint venture of Jump and
| Virtu, also some big names within the HFT space.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| I would love to see commercial broadcasts on shortwave.
|
| But this is from high frequency stock traders. What are they
| planning?
| gh02t wrote:
| Oversimplifying: disparate exchanges can have short-lived price
| differences arising from price updates taking some time to
| propagate across the world. They wanna beam price data and
| buy/sell orders super fast between points to try to beat these
| differences by buying and selling the spread before the price
| settles. It's dumb but lucrative if you can do it.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I know practically nothing about ham radio. I believe that
| encrypted messages are not allowed. Would this change that?
| bityard wrote:
| This doesn't have anything to do with ham radio, except for the
| fact that some of the frequencies that the coalition is
| petitioning for are adjacent to ham radio frequencies, which
| introduce the potential for interference.
|
| Hams tend to be very sensitive about interference, and rightly
| so. It's already pretty much impossible to do HF communications
| in urban areas due to the high noise floor caused by poorly
| designed switch mode power supplies, solar inverters, power
| over ethernet, etc.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| For a particular band, yes
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| No, it would only permit commercial non-voice, non-broadcast
| communications on frequencies not allocated to ham radio.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Those commercial non-voice, non-broadcast communications
| could be encrypted, no?
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| Yes, but they can't be used by ham radio operators.
| wordsarelies wrote:
| Hft needs to die.
|
| This is the mutant expectation of a company that's very existence
| hinges on fucking over legitimate human made trades.
| [deleted]
| ke88y wrote:
| From the petition:
|
| _> Licensed use of 2-25 MHz Band frequencies as proposed in this
| Petition would enable financial firms, including firms like the
| SMC members that act as market makers, to improve efficiency,
| increase liquidity, and reduce transaction costs in the financial
| markets in which they participate, thereby benefiting all market
| participants._
|
| I am generally sympathetic to commercial use of spectrum, but
| allocating this band to prop firms doing high-frequency trading
| is fucking nuts. Can we please use this spectrum for something
| that actually contributes anything real to the world?
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Truly an allocation with zero or negative net value.
|
| Wouldn't they relatively be equal off if the latency for _all_
| firms was increased by say 100ms.
| ke88y wrote:
| I'm fairly convinced that trading venues should be
| substantially slowed such that HFT isn't a thing. I am
| unconvinced that the benefits of liquidity are worth the
| resources allocated. I'm also skeptical of the Religion of
| Liquidity -- I think maybe after a certain point increasing
| liquidity is not necessarily a net good.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| There's actually an exchange that did this. In order to
| avoid software problems that would negate the slowing, they
| actually plugged their servers into a giant box full of
| fiber optic cable. If someone manages to get past that,
| then they don't have an HFT firm, they have a time machine.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4
| mlyle wrote:
| Kinda wonder what they're going to send, too. I mean, sure:
| more direct paths, but there's not that much bandwidth, so the
| symbol rate is not that high (and the time it takes you to send
| your message is latency, too).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-
| tr...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17028892
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, I'm familiar... it doesn't answer my question (the
| past discussion had some slight speculation in the same
| direction).
| cycomanic wrote:
| You're correct that data rates are not consistently high
| (although you will get bursts of traffic with significant
| rate), but a higher bandwidth channel allows you to reduce
| your latency as you can transmit your ethernet frame faster
| (even if it contains little data, the rest might be packed
| with random data).
| mlyle wrote:
| You misunderstand what I'm saying-- I'm saying that the
| throughput of a channel that's a few kilohertz wide isn't
| high, so it must necessarily add some delay to messages
| (making the advantage from HF over optical fiber smaller).
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| I've seen what this is a counter proposal to on a wed-based
| SDR, and there were ten carriers within a 5 kHz space. The 10
| carriers were switching on and off. It seemed to me like it
| was using a much more basic definition of digital, meaning
| off was "0" and on was "1". This would/could be a zero
| latency system, if the extended information was sent by
| legacy IP/internet, but the commands that require zero
| latency (i.e., "buy", "sell") were sent as a carrier on/off
| signal.
|
| This proposal is for a 50 kHz system, so if they used
| bandwidth in the same way, that would be 100 carriers sending
| on/off commands and/or combinations.
|
| This is for a Part 90 (of the FCC rules) operation, so I
| would guess they'd install a Part 90 UHF transmitter at the
| place business is being conducted to control or retransmit to
| the Part 90 shortwave transmitter, which would take up too
| much physical space in most buiness environments.
| mlyle wrote:
| > This would/could be a zero latency system
|
| No, this is just discrete multitone. Leaving aside the
| issue of errors, it still takes you time to know the
| carrier is gone. You'd have much better choices about how
| to do this that are more spectrally efficient and
| equivalent in latency.
|
| Reductio ad absurdum: if it were zero latency, you could
| turn on and off the signal infinitely fast, and then send
| an infinite amount of information across a narrow channel.
|
| > This proposal is for a 50 kHz system, so if they used
| bandwidth in the same way, that would be 100 carriers
| sending on/off commands and/or combinations.
|
| Yah, or broadly: it's like OFDM. You don't have to
| constrain yourself to one bit per carrier, and you can use
| error coding across multiple carriers, etc.
|
| Also important to consider authentication...
| RF_Enthusiast wrote:
| Yes, those are both good points. Also, a bad actor could
| straight up jam the signal.
|
| If you want to check out the signal of the competing
| system, it's just above or just below 15.735 MHz, using
| the sidebands of a shortwave broadcaster operating in
| Digital Radio Mondiale. 5 kHz is usually the DRMondiale
| signal, and 5 kHz is the sideband transmission.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Microwave links for HF are already ubiquitous. I find it
| surprising that nobody jams the signals, but it isn't
| happening to large extend AFAIK
| eterevsky wrote:
| Using more power directly increases bandwidth according to
| Shannon's theorem.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It increases the channel capacity. Bandwidth (spectral
| occupancy) remains the same. (Apart from increased
| distortion associated with higher-power transmitters in the
| real world, of course.)
| mlyle wrote:
| More power increases throughput for a given bandwidth (not
| proportionally), but we're talking about 20kW, which is not
| so much (the path loss is high).
| cozzyd wrote:
| and also increases the probability of receiving the signal,
| as HF is finicky.
| mlyle wrote:
| These are the "same thing" -- energy per bit / noise
| density chooses your bit error rate (and not enough
| energy per bit goes off a cliff to 50% errors where you
| don't transfer any information).
| cozzyd wrote:
| yes that's fair! Not being able to receive the signal at
| all is a gross form of lack of information density.
| WJW wrote:
| Technically there's not really such a thing as "Not being
| able to receive the signal at all", the signal is there
| it is just (many thousands of times) lower than the noise
| floor and almost impossible to recover. There are
| information theoretic tricks you can do with the shape of
| the signal to still fit a few bits/second in there but it
| is going to be pretty low. GPS and other satellite
| navigation systems are probably the most prevalent
| systems that do this; the satellites don't have all that
| much power but receivers make it work even with very
| small antennas.
| cozzyd wrote:
| There is surely a quantum limit here. For example, try a
| THz signal through a wall...
| WJW wrote:
| I would think even a Thz signal through a wall is still
| trillions of times above any quantum limit.
|
| Still, now you've got me curious and I'd be grateful for
| some proper boffins to elucidate us further: if you have
| an transmitter emitting single photons in an isotropic
| antenna pattern, could they still be received by a
| receiver even though there is no "wave" to speak of? Even
| if part of the information is going in another direction?
| There is some proper double slit-type weirdness going on
| there.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mikewarot wrote:
| If they could be required to use a publicly known format for
| their transmissions, with no restrictions on reception of said
| signals for any purpose, them I'm all for it.
|
| Having some known fixed beacons spewing transmissions that could
| be received and then used to recover the source information
| before encoding, would turn all of the transmitters into a wide-
| band source of probes for the ionosphere that we could all
| benefit from.
|
| Knowing the format of the transmissions would also allow us to
| develop SDR software that automatically filters it out,
| completely. This would also allow us to use the same
| transmissions for passive radar, as all the transmission sites
| are fixed.
|
| This could be a win-win for everyone, _as long as the format is
| fixed, and publicly known_. What they do with the data before
| sending it into the ether is their own business, I 'm sure they
| could generate sufficient amounts of truly random bits and
| courier it between locations to use one time codes (a simple XOR,
| with almost ZERO delay) to keep their confidential business
| information safe.
|
| 20 Kw might seem like a lot, but the ionosphere is a fickle
| beast, and this isn't going to be completely reliable even at
| those power levels. It's only about 13 dB more than the most
| powerful ham rigs, and 3 dB less than most Clear Channel AM radio
| transmitters. It's not entirely unreasonable.
| jesprenj wrote:
| www.arrl.org does not resolve
|
| arrl.org does
| threeio wrote:
| Yeah, the ARRL's technical team is... lacking.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Anybody know how difficult it is to file an FCC comment?
|
| Amateur radio aside, this would likely have adverse impact on
| several scientific research fields (e.g. ionospheric radars, 21
| cm cosmology, radio-detection of energetic particles), including
| some things I'm interested in. While HF is already a mess, when
| adding even more energetic transmitters that will be seen all
| around the world, the benefits should be be weighed against the
| potential impacts....
| drmpeg wrote:
| https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings
|
| And then put RM-11953 in the Proceeding(s) box.
| cozzyd wrote:
| thanks, just submitted a comment!
| emptybits wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| Direct link to submit an Express Comment on the petition: htt
| ps://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express?proceeding[name]=RM...
| [deleted]
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