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FCC to Investigate Raised RF Noise Floor
- nikanj 10y agoDo the regulations really work anyway, in this world of Walmart and Alibaba?
- krastanov 10y agoI can imagine a public or private entity that goes around and fines people that do not switch off bad equipment and fine the manufacturer (or bar them from doing business in the country).
- nikanj 10y agoThe manufacturer is often nearly impossible to find, and they're not doing business in the country, some enterprising ebay power seller is. Baby monitors, wireless yard cameras etc are often absolute garbage from an RF point of view, and sold with brand names such as "best for baby". Good luck trying to nail that company.
- tlrobinson 10y agoThey can fine the seller as well, though. The ARRL complained to the FCC about Home Depot marketing commercial lighting ballasts to consumers, for example: http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-complains-to-fcc-about-the-home-depot-s-marketing-of-rf-lighting-devices http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-complains-to-fcc-about-the-hom... Not sure if anything has come of that particular case though.
- lucaspiller 10y agoIf you buy from AliExpress the seller usually isn't even based in your country either. I guess they could go after the postal service for delivery non-compliant equipment /s
- lostlogin 10y agoDon't even think about touching my free shipping.
- ubernostrum 10y agoThe FCC's mandate isn't to stop everyone everywhere in the world from producing crap $5 baby monitors that spew noise on the whole spectrum. Their mandate is to keep those crap baby monitors out of the US and off US markets. Which they can do relatively easily; even if the manufacturer is hiding behind seven proxies, twelve shell companies and sourcing from two dozen countries, those baby monitors still had to get into the US at a particular port of entry, had to be sold by someone who had the ability to take payments from and arrange delivery to people in the US, etc., and that's going to point to someone the FCC can happily issue big fines to, discouraging them from continuing to import/sell the devices.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ultramancool 10y agoThere are literally dozens of sites you can buy cell jammers from, pay with PayPal and get it in the mail a few weeks later. The mail is really not checked for this kind of violation very often. Who are you going to sue if I order a cell jammer from a China or Hong Kong based company and your own governmental postal service delivers it to me? How about if it's just a crappy or malfunctioning device that leaks and I have no knowledge of it? It's a very difficult thing to police... almost approaching war on drugs territory.
- throwanem 10y ago> Who are you going to sue if I order a cell jammer from a China or Hong Kong based company and your own governmental postal service delivers it to me? Nobody, but you might go to prison: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jamming-cell-phones-and-gps-equipment-against-law https://www.fcc.gov/general/jamming-cell-phones-and-gps-equi...
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y agoThe fine and jail time apply to the person operating the jammer. By the way, these "dozens of sites" are all too happy to turn over purchase records to law enforcement if asked. As for "it's a very difficult thing to police", a jammer is a transmitter, one that's powerful enough to drown out the signals it's designed to jam. Turning one on is like turning on a giant flashing billboard saying "ARREST ME" over your head; it's easy to follow the jamming signal back to the source with the right equipment, which, of course, the FCC and similar agencies have plenty of. Want some examples? "FCC Proposes $29K Fine For Employer That Jammed Employee Cell Phones" https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-proposes-29k-fine-employer-jammed-employee-cell-phones https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-proposes-29k-fine-employer-... "Florida Man Gets $48K Fine From FCC For Using Cell Phone Jammer" http://www.techtimes.com/articles/161146/20160526/florida-man-gets-48k-fine-from-fcc-for-using-cell-phone-jammer.htm http://www.techtimes.com/articles/161146/20160526/florida-ma... "FCC Fines Operator of GPS Jammer That Affected Newark Airport GBAS" http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3676 http://www.insidegnss.com/node/3676 "Man arrested for allegedly using cell phone jammer on train" http://www.cnet.com/news/man-arrested-for-allegedly-using-cell-phone-jammer-on-train/ http://www.cnet.com/news/man-arrested-for-allegedly-using-ce...
- tremon 10y agoI can imagine a public or private entity that goes around and fines people Like the RIAA? No thank you, I'd rather keep those powers in government's hands.
- Johnny555 10y agoHam Radio operators or clubs will often track down rogue radio operators or significant sources of noise, like arcing power lines and report the source to the power company or FCC.
- marcosdumay 10y agoYou do really not want a private entity creating mandatory public policies. Really, you do not. Ever. That is, if you value living in a democracy. If you'd rather have an efficient absolutist state, go on, create them.
- colechristensen 10y agoThe FCC has great fun giving out 5- and 6-digit fines. They're pretty reasonable about it too. If it's an honest mistake or misunderstanding, a first time, or you're under some financial hardship no- or readuced-fines are common. If you willfully continue to violate, especially if you've been warned, huge and or daily fines are common. ... Equipment is regulated and you can't sell things that break regulations. If fining the retailer isn't effective or possible, they use the financial system against you and threaten the payment processor. All of these fines are adequate to pay for enforcement. When it comes down to it, many of the threats which might annoy the public could just as easily be threats to national security with slight tweaks to frequency. With that, there's no problem getting continued support for enforcement all the way from the top. ... Here are some warnings http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/ http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/FieldNotices/ Here are some orders http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/rfo/ActAct.html http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/rfo/ActAct.html
- debaserab2 10y agoWow... That seems reasonable and exactly the way a government agency should work.
- nerdponx 10y agoIt sounds like Obama put some really competent people at the FCC. Just look at what happened with net neutrality, the head of the FCC is now one of its big champions. Politics aside, it's not every day that you get to appreciate what a government agency is doing like this.
- deelowe 10y agoWhile the net neutrality comment is valid, the FCC was a good agency well before his tenure. The amateur radio community can attest to this.
- coldpie 10y agoThe government is staffed by people and the vast majority of it does work well and has real flexibility on a case-by-case basis. What you hear about are the problem cases: the NSA, the FBI, abusive police, mandatory minimums. What you don't hear about is everything else.
- zaroth 10y agoHow can this be a real problem with exponential signal loss over distance? Sure, two devices in close proximity may interfere with each other. But that is in no way a "noise floor issue which will render certain frequencies unusable."
- krastanov 10y agoSignal strength does not decay exponentially, rather as distance^-3 for a dipole[1]. Most noise sources are probably well approximated by a dipole antenna[2]. Some fancy modern modulation scheme with extremely dense encoding of information might suffer stronger decay, but the article is about simple sources of noise, not about modern modulation schemes. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole#Vector_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole#Vector_form [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna#Hertzian_dipole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna#Hertzian_dipole
- Bromskloss 10y ago> rather as distance^-3 for a dipole Wait a minute. The radiated power in the far field goes like r^-2, right?
- kqr 10y agoThis is my intuition as well, because at a distance r around the source you have a sphere, and the area of the sphere will relate to the radius r as r^-2. That said, the equation linked in the comment does indeed contain an r^-3 factor. I don't know if it's cancelled out by something else – my physics game isn't strong enough.
- Bromskloss 10y agoThe expressions for the field include terms of different powers of r. At large distances (compared to the wavelength) from the transmitting antenna, only the r^-1 terms (which dies off with r more slowly than the others) remain with any appreciable strength. This is called the "far-field". The power per cross-sectional area is proportional to E·B (or, equivalently, to E^2 or to B^2), and therefore goes as r^-2.
- teraformer 10y agoGee, I wonder if it has anything to do with cell phones, and in particular, the high bandwidth data consumption of smart phones. Look toward a city skyline at night. Or even a small town. You'll see a blended haze of light reaching up into the sky. Probably a similar deal with the general radio spectrum emissions, now that everyone's carrying the equivalent of pocket RF flash lights, and walking in proximity to the RF street lamps that cell phone towers have become.
- tlrobinson 10y agoEven non-radio devices like lighting ballasts, solar panel charge controllers, inverters, etc can cause lots of noise.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoI'm a radio ham. No, it has little-to-nothing to do with smartphones, which are incredibly tightly regulated and operate in very tightly defined bands of the EM spectrum. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that the problem is mostly from unregulated imported electronics that emit all kinds of broadband RF noise as a consequence of being made cheaply.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- friendzis 10y agoContinuing your analogy, cell phones are like supermarket barcode scanners: weak and clearly red. It does not really matter how many of them you cram into a room, you can still send morse code with a green laser. All devices have small daylight lamp attached to them, the power of which is rather strictly regulated (IEC-61000, if anyone is interested). If you cram a lot of them into a room, morse coding with that green laser becomes difficult. You could increase power/brightness of the laser and call the problem solved. But then try to measure brightness of your lighting fixtures - becomes quite difficult. So no, proliferation of cell phones is only a problem for cell phones (one of the reasons for migrations 2G -> 3G -> 4G). The real problem are other devices transmitting in cell phone spectra effectively DDoS'ing them.
- fit2rule 10y agoWait, isn't this all free energy, waiting to be harvested?
- creshal 10y agoWhat's the efficiency of RF harvesters? 1%? 5%? Not worth it.
- kqr 10y agoGoing along with the metaphor of the submission: sure, in the same way you can plant a solar cell on your roof and get "free energy" from the light pollution during the night if you live in a city. Or, literally, the energy is way too low to benefit from it. Sure, the TV might blanket space with a few watts of interference, but going by the law of quadratic decay that's not worth much at distance. All this noise does is prevent observation of low-energy signals. It does not contribute to a high-energy signal itself. (Goes for both light pollution and RF noise.) Edit: unless, of course, you mean we can "harvest" this free energy by making our appliances conform to regulations, in which case it's an obvious yes.
- cbd1984 10y agoYes, which raises one possible way of fighting it: Make electronics manufacturers adhere to power efficiency ratings. The moment they have to care about how power efficient their gear is, they'll look at everywhere power's being wasted by, I don't know, being broadcast into the air for absolutely no good reason.
- MertsA 10y agoThat's probably not going to be effective. Look at devices with cheap universal motors and the like. They spew out tons of noise and a lot of them have a filter on the input to cut down on noise but as far as decreasing wasted power, the RF noise is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the total power of whatever power tool or vacuum we're talking about. Also, the filter that they put on the input to try to combat this doesn't increase the efficiency of the device. If anything, I'd be afraid that there would be design changes to decrease the thermal losses of a device even if it increased the noise it put out.
- yyyuuu 10y agoSorry for my ignorance, but How will extreme levels of RF noise disrupt the modern day life?
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoMany things rely on RF signal to operate. More noise means a worse signal-to-noise ratio. This means that things that rely on RF may stop working, or not work as well.
- nxzero 10y agoTaken to an extreme, intential noise injection is malicious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming
- kqr 10y agoWe're nowhere near "extreme" levels of noise yet, thankfully. Extreme levels of noise will – just like audio noise – cancel out any signal you're trying to emit. That's a real problem because everything communicates by radio these days. But even though we're nowhere near extreme levels, this still causes problems in some areas of the world. I don't remember the specifics, but some train-related communications system where I live uses a part of the spectrum that's apparently very busy. This means the train drivers often have to rely on the civilian cell phone system to communicate, which in an emergency will be absolutely swamped and really hard to use.
- lostlogin 10y agoIf the MRI engineer we use is to believed, us leaving the scanner door open by accident led to a very grumpy letter to the MR vendor by the coast guard. 3T so I'm guessing 128ish MHz, I'll let someone else judge if this story is bs.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- VLM 10y agoKessler syndrome cascade. The Kessler syndrome is about satellites, once you have an overpopulation they collide, smash into smaller bits, causing more collisions, causing more impacts, until its foolish to launch another satellite to replace the damaged ones because it'll get destroyed immediately and merely create more junk that destroys whats already up there, and launching an armored (military) satellite would just result in more bits of armor destroying more satellites, etc. Likewise the analogy goes that every receiver needs a certain minimal signal to noise ratio to operate, to demodulate correctly with an acceptable bit error rate. Well, if the noise level goes up your only option is to increase transmitter power level which eats battery and ruins the environment and makes your radio link work, but you just increased the noise level for all the OTHER systems nearby which have to increase their power levels until your system doesn't work, rinse and repeat until nothing works. A real world historical example is the social media like, CB radio boom of the late 70s. I realize not too many people here are old enough to remember that. But a system that worked well for a modest number of users at a legal and clean 5 watts of transmitter power, suddenly had way too high a density of users, all running illegal noisy 100 watt amplifiers because they wanted to be heard over other illegal noisy 100 watt amplifier users, etc. Eventually the system completely collapsed and all the users left because it didn't work for anyone anymore and CB is in the dustbin of history, pretty much. In the long run to an end user it would look like in the countryside your bluetooth or wifi or anything else that uses radio will have a very long lasting battery and great range and be pretty reliable although the hardware will be much more expensive than it is now to try and work in the city, but in the city the battery life drops by a significant fraction, everything is slow and unreliable, range drops from across a large room to just a couple inches for bluetooth if it works at all, wifi is unusable in some areas that have hundreds of access points interfering with each other, etc. Some services would simply stop working in a very high noise environment due to high difficulty of increasing transmitter power. No more GPS, broadcast radio, possibly cell phone service, probably no more police/fire radios. The concept of a police car no longer having a usable reliable radio is weird.
- coroutines 10y agoMy grandfather has a theory that it's the PG&E Smart water meters that have been rolling out that's doing this... I'm not a radio guy, so I don't know how plausible that sounds.
- raverbashing 10y agoIf they really got smart water meters that don't follow FCC regulations, they're in for a bad time
- kazinator 10y agoLots of people have grandpas and grandmas who believe smart meters to be the devil's work.
- nxzero 10y agoSeems like the NSA would have all the data the the FCC needs, is this right, or no?
- lostlogin 10y agoHow? What am I missing?
- ConroyBumpus 10y agoFunny, but incorrect. This mostly has to do with spurious RF noise generated by badly engineered devices like power supplies or manual light dimmer switches - things that aren't designed to communicate. Manufacturers are supposed to test for these sorts of emissions, but frequently don't.
- nxzero 10y agoMeaning you're claiming in a cities NYC & DC that the NSA doesn't to full spectrum dumps, right? Or that they would have not looked into statistically unusual high amounts of background noise? If the NSA does this, they'd have the info. If they don't, I'd be curious why; meaning legal, physical limits, etc.
- nicotonic 10y agoWell... https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1le3if/so_i_discovered_that_my_hp_laptop_leakstransmits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1le3if/so_i_discove...
- headShrinker 10y agoThis has nothing to do with the NSA, and the NSA has no interest in RF noise. The noise isn't some encrypted electronic communication. It's electromagnetic noise as a byproduct of poorly designed electronic products. It's like if in a chemistry lecture if all the students started humming, it would become difficult to hear the lecture. So there is no connection to the NSA.
- w8rbt 10y agoThis can be fixed, however, electronics will cost more when properly designed and filtered. Until interference impacts a lot of people (not just hams and OTA TV viewers) no one will care enough to do anything about it.
- maxerickson 10y agoOnly if they realize it is a problem. I did a short term thing where I was a passenger with someone that was on the road all the time. They had no idea that their Walmartian USB power adapter was blowing out radio reception until I unplugged it.
- kazinator 10y agoI experience crappiness in guitar tone that follows a very rigid weekly pattern. For instance, the rig reliably puts out amazing "mojo" Sunday evenings. Every Monday morning, there is something somewhat displeasing and blatty in the tone that cannot be EQ'd out. High gain distortion are susceptible due to their nonlinearity. Any RF mixing in there gets modulated down into the audio band. I greatly improved the issue with ferrite beads, but not 100%. Not all music equipment has good defenses against the ingress of RF. Shunt capacitors on inputs are often omitted, and series inductors are rarely used. The grounding isn't the best: often, unbalanced input and output jacks have ground connections to the audio circuit board, rather than to a Kelvin ground at the power supply. RF can get into the board via that path.
- rconti 10y agoEnjoying all the interference Sunday nights when everyone's home watching TV, but when everyone leaves for work Monday morning, there's less pleasing interference? :)
- kazinator 10y agoIt's different if you live in an area where everyone comes to or through on Monday morning.
- Johnythree 10y agoI'm wasting my breath I know, but if a Transmitter is affecting a non-radio device it can never be the fault of the Transmitter. As you say, the problem is lack of "Immunity" in your guitar amp, and not a fault in the transmitters around you. Importantly there is nothing which can be done at the Transmitters to cure your problem. Only better design of your music equipment will fix the problem. Your claim that "High gain distortion are susceptible due to their nonlinearity" is just wrong. Any electronics can be properly shielded by good design. That your fuzz-pedal misbehaves is due to cheap design. The topic here is spurious emissions, which are a tiny, tiny percentage of actual wanted transmissions. If your guitar amp is effected by spurious emissions, then it would be totally wiped out by any radio transmissions in your neighbourhood.
- grandalf 10y agoI posted this the other day, looks like it missed dupe-detection ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11946490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11946490