13 ms·

The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

220 points by Errorcod3 7y ago

howard941 7y ago
There are too many existing terrestrial and space users for this to fly. They're not getting a globally harmonized ham band. Is it April 1?
- Sanzig 7y ago
  Especially not one of the most popular bands for new hams (and probably one of the most popular bands period). The vast majority of young hams these days enter the hobby by getting whichever basic license their country offers and buying a cheap Chinese dual-band 2m/70cm handheld radio (like the ubiquitous Baofeng). Learning how the repeaters work is a rite of passage. While I think 70cm is probably more popular than 2m in Europe, 2m is the preferred default in North America. Just about everywhere you go on the continent, you'll be able to find a 2m band FM repeater on some nearby hilltop with the customary 600 kHz channel spacing and a CTCSS control tone. Is every cash-strapped amateur radio club supposed to go and drop a few grand to convert all these stations to 70cm? I could probably see an argument for potentially clawing back (not eliminating) the bandwidth for some of the microwave allocations in C band and up, which are definitely under-utilized by the amateur radio community. But Thales trying to make a land-grab on one of the most popular ham bands simply because it happens to be globally allocated is utterly absurd.
  - jedimastert 7y ago
    > The vast majority of young hams these days enter the hobby by getting whichever basic license their country offers and buying a cheap Chinese dual-band 2m/70cm handheld radio (like the ubiquitous Baofeng). Calling in as one of those people. Part of the reason I did so is that, for a small time commitment and about $30 I can do a small part of community service in the form of traffic nets and external communication (I do regularly check into the local traffic net, although I've yet to generate or accept any traffic. I should do that at one point)
- nvahalik 7y ago
  According to the article, it's only 144-146. Here in the US, we actually have 144-148 (4Mhz wide). I wouldn't be surprised if not only the ARRL got involved but other government agencies as well, here, if this actually looked like it was going to occur. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the 2M band is the workhorse for things like storm spotters talking to the NWS. All storm spotting happens on a 2M repeater here as well as across networks all across the midwest. There is no simple replacement for it. There are millions of dollars in investment by thousands of smaller organizations that would be a massive burden to replace.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321272
- dang 7y ago
  Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20178799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20178799
t0mas88 7y ago
The proposed frequency is just above the aviation VHF band (108 to 136Mhz) so it makes sense to use it when aviation runs out of frequencies to use. However... EASA has made all aviation radios switch from 25Khz channel spacing to 8.33Khz channel spacing, essentially tripling the available number of frequencies for everything between 118 and 136Mhz. So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe). The US has some shortage (and still uses 25Khz channel separation), but they solved it by sharing frequencies between small airports.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe). This isn't about voice / ATC, but rather about up/downlinks for drones and such. From the background on the proposal: > The decisions of previous conferences have introduced some restrictions to the use and have imposed constraints on the development of aeronautical mobile applications within some existing mobile allocations traditionally used by the aeronautical mobile applications. > At the same time, the number of manned and unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors has grown significantly in the past 20 years together with the need of bidirectional low to high data rate communications. Aeronautical applications like fire surveillance, border surveillance, air quality and environment monitoring, traffic monitoring, disaster monitoring, terrain modelling, imagery (visible, infrared, radar, meteo), video monitoring require non-safety communications between various types of aeronautical platforms. > Consequently the need of non-safety data communications between various types of aeronautical platforms increases and so the need for new frequency bands. * https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-documents/file-history/?fid=51940 https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-...
  - moftz 7y ago
    Why would you want to try to pump video over VHF? You have line of sight to everyone when you are in an airplane. Use a higher frequency band that allows for much more bandwidth and therefore higher data speeds. The little 1.2GHz video transmitters can easily reach 10km. That is cruising altitude for a commercial airliner. Having the proper license would get you even greater distance with a higher transmit power. Have the drone/UAV transmit ADS-B data and use GPS position to point a high-gain directional antenna at it, that should get you even more bandwidth.
RappingBoomer 7y ago
the ISPs are likely using ham radio as a weapon to fight against liberalization of radio freqs, which they see as possible future competition
curiousfab 7y ago
The fact that there was little opposition was partly due to the short time between the submittal of the amended proposal by France and the meeting itself. Here's some background by someone who is well connected with the German authorities: http://mailman.pe1itr.com/pipermail/moon-net/2019-June/039773.html http://mailman.pe1itr.com/pipermail/moon-net/2019-June/03977...
PaulHoule 7y ago
I have this radio https://www.amazon.com/Yaesu-FT-60R-Handheld-Amateur-Transceiver/dp/B00Q1UYR1G https://www.amazon.com/Yaesu-FT-60R-Handheld-Amateur-Transce... which works on both the 2-meter and 70-cm band, particularly if you use this kind of antenna: http://hamuniverse.com/2mladjpole.html http://hamuniverse.com/2mladjpole.html I live in a poor spot for 2m, we have some active club repeaters. Someone is always listening on those repeaters, but they probably don't want to chat with you. The west coast has more VHF and UHF action than any place I have been on the east. There are repeaters with people who talk nonstop in English, Spanish, other languages. You hear people talking on 2m at 4:00 in the morning around Van Nuyes.
rsuelzer 7y ago
as an aside, I got my ham radio licence because of my interest in long distance microwave mesh networking. there is a group called aredn http://www.arednmesh.org http://www.arednmesh.org which uses wifi devices modified to run in the Amateur portions of 2ghz and 5ghz to create massive mesh networks. The lack of noise on our allocations means we can make really long connections. I personally have a 50 dollar Microtik dish that makes a 25 mile connection to a backbone node and get about 25mbps. If there are any HAMs that are reading this, or you want to become a HAM it's a fun project that blends computers and radio.
- arwineap 7y ago
  I seem to remember some issues around running anything encrypted on frequencies meant for the public, but I've always been interesting in citizen mesh networking. Is it legal, or just not enforced?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    At least in the US, encryption of any kind on amateur bands is prohibited. Hams tend to be really good at self-policing, so if a curious person horns in on your traffic and discovers that it's encrypted, you can expect a knock on your door, if you're lucky from the guy that looked up your license from the public database (you're required to transmit your callsign at regular intervals) to ask you to fix it, if you're unlucky, from an FCC enforcement guy in a suit.
    - dmix 7y ago
      So if you can't run any modern internet what would you use the mesh network for? Some of Google's traffic charts show up to 90% of traffic is TLS in the US for Chrome users.
      - rsuelzer 7y ago
quotemstr 7y ago
Unpopular opinion time: spectrum is a limited resource. We shouldn't waste it on efficient analog technologies like conventional commercial and amateur radio. We've already ceased conventional broadcasts: that's a step in the right direction, but there's more to do. The entire RF spectrum should be devoted to LTE-like efficient, packetized, and secure communication. I'd make small exceptions for things like radio astronomy, but I don't think we should be squandering prime regions of the EM frequency space just to support transceivers that Marconi would have recognized.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  I was talking with a friend the other day, a brilliant young software developer at Google, and the topic of ham radio came up. He said what really got him excited about it was the possibility of building his own transmitter from scratch, using individual components he could see and fully understand. I think that is something to encourage even in this day of LTE.
- geggam 7y ago
  The solar flare that eliminates all the modern methods appreciates your opinion
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    People have been bringing up the solar flare electromagnetic boogeyman for decades. It's never been an actual problem
    - geggam 7y ago
      Maybe not your lifetime but it has happened and we have been damned lucky more than once recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...
      - 7y ago
throw0101a 7y ago
The official proposal if anyone is interested: > The decisions of previous conferences have introduced some restrictions to the use and have imposed constraints on the development of aeronautical mobile applications within some existing mobile allocations traditionally used by the aeronautical mobile applications. > At the same time, the number of manned and unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors has grown significantly in the past 20 years together with the need of bidirectional low to high data rate communications. Aeronautical applications like fire surveillance, border surveillance, air quality and environment monitoring, traffic monitoring, disaster monitoring, terrain modelling, imagery (visible, infrared, radar, meteo), video monitoring require non-safety communications between various types of aeronautical platforms. > Consequently the need of non-safety data communications between various types of aeronautical platforms increases and so the need for new frequency bands. * https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-documents/file-history/?fid=51940 https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-...
- Sanzig 7y ago
  The thing is, 2 MHz of bandwidth in VHF isn't going to help the vast majority of those use cases. The best you can hope for is low-rate telemetry in that band (since that 2 MHz is going to need to be shared with other UAV users, and the noise temperature at VHF is horrendous due to man-made interference). Those use cases more properly belong in the microwave bands. Why aren't they going after allocation in L-band and S-band? I also fail to understand why they need an globally coordinated allocation for this. Surely with GPS + cognitive radio approaches, a UAV could use a local allocation set aside for this purpose wherever it's operating?
kylehotchkiss 7y ago
I can't help but feel the amateur radio community could have used a rebrand for the internet age. I understand there's a lot of history but it's hard to get young people interested in being _hams_, a word that has not aged well. I got my licence about a decade back and really loved the technical pieces - learning about how radio waves worked, propagation with different bands, the ability to (try) to build your own modem with two radios and an Arduino, but when it came to actually talking to people on the radio... other people just wanted to talk about radios. It is really fascinating what you can do with 2m band radios. For those times and places where your cell phone won't work, digital modes on the new Icom radios look pretty cool. Being able to hook up a radio to a laptop to send something digitally still seems valuable and relevant! But the community branding could use some modernization to push those use cases.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > other people just wanted to talk about radios. I felt the same disappointment when I got into amateur radio just before the modern internet took off. I loved the idea of talking with people around the world and maybe even practicing some foreign languages, so I immediately set up a station for DXing. All those people from exotic foreign countries just wanted to make a few quick remarks about their radios. No one wanted to exchange any actual culture. But to be fair, the wording of amateur radio regulations in many countries suggests that hams should not try to have substantial conversations over the airwaves. Also, since amateur radio is hobby dominated by older people, a lot of hams in Eastern Europe still remember the Communist era when contact with foreigners was supposed to be strictly business.
  - madengr 7y ago
    Well at least with SSB and CW you have a short conversation. JT8, etc, have reduced “contacts” to a few bytes. Don’t get me wrong, pushing the Shannon capacity limit is great, but I’ll wager many stations are not even running QRP for the newer digital modes.
    - lawfulcactus 7y ago
msisk6 7y ago
From the ARRL: http://www.arrl.org/news/restraint-urged-in-response-to-2-meter-reallocation-proposal http://www.arrl.org/news/restraint-urged-in-response-to-2-me...
saul_goodman 7y ago
There's a lot more to this than simply taking spectrum away from hams. This potentially affects other ham bands too. The allotted spectrum for ham use was designed intelligently to reduce (though not completely eliminate) the chances of hams accidentally clobbering folks outside of a ham band with harmonics. So for someone operating in the 10 meter band (28-29.7MHz), the 2nd harmonic is the 6 meter band (50-54MHz), the 8th harmonic is the 1.25m band (220-224MHz) and the 16th harmonic is the 2 meter band being discussed. The closest band to cause interference on the 2m band would be users of the the 1.25m band though as the 2m band is the 2nd harmonic from it. Also, this is why the 2m and 70cm bands (144/440MHz) are commonly included on the same radio: one antenna can sort-of work for both bands. The antenna is tuned for the 2m band and that means it will also radiate 3rd harmonic excitations as well (the 440MHz band is the 3rd harmonic from the 144MHz band). So it works decent for 2 meters and as a crappy but acceptable 70cm band antenna. The only casualty is the 2nd harmonic band between them at 288MHz which is not allocated to hams. But anyway, there's no "type acceptance" required for ham radios because that allows hams to build their own gear and not just be appliance operators. Thales is setting themselves up for a lifetime of potential problems if they manage to crack open the 2m band for commercial use. Lastly, I will say that this is from the US perspective, I'm less well versed in ITU regions and bands available outside of the US. Thanks.
tlrobinson 7y ago
There are millions of these radios in the hands of both licensed hams AND unlicensed preppers/airsoft players/etc who bought their $25 BaoFeng radio on Amazon. Thales wants to reallocate the band for autonomous drone operations. What could possibly go wrong?

220 points by Errorcod3 7y ago

There are too many existing terrestrial and space users for this to fly. They're not getting a globally harmonized ham band. Is it April 1?

Sanzig 7y ago
Especially not one of the most popular bands for new hams (and probably one of the most popular bands period). The vast majority of young hams these days enter the hobby by getting whichever basic license their country offers and buying a cheap Chinese dual-band 2m/70cm handheld radio (like the ubiquitous Baofeng). Learning how the repeaters work is a rite of passage. While I think 70cm is probably more popular than 2m in Europe, 2m is the preferred default in North America. Just about everywhere you go on the continent, you'll be able to find a 2m band FM repeater on some nearby hilltop with the customary 600 kHz channel spacing and a CTCSS control tone. Is every cash-strapped amateur radio club supposed to go and drop a few grand to convert all these stations to 70cm? I could probably see an argument for potentially clawing back (not eliminating) the bandwidth for some of the microwave allocations in C band and up, which are definitely under-utilized by the amateur radio community. But Thales trying to make a land-grab on one of the most popular ham bands simply because it happens to be globally allocated is utterly absurd.
- jedimastert 7y ago
  > The vast majority of young hams these days enter the hobby by getting whichever basic license their country offers and buying a cheap Chinese dual-band 2m/70cm handheld radio (like the ubiquitous Baofeng). Calling in as one of those people. Part of the reason I did so is that, for a small time commitment and about $30 I can do a small part of community service in the form of traffic nets and external communication (I do regularly check into the local traffic net, although I've yet to generate or accept any traffic. I should do that at one point)
nvahalik 7y ago
According to the article, it's only 144-146. Here in the US, we actually have 144-148 (4Mhz wide). I wouldn't be surprised if not only the ARRL got involved but other government agencies as well, here, if this actually looked like it was going to occur. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the 2M band is the workhorse for things like storm spotters talking to the NWS. All storm spotting happens on a 2M repeater here as well as across networks all across the midwest. There is no simple replacement for it. There are millions of dollars in investment by thousands of smaller organizations that would be a massive burden to replace.

i_am_proteus 7y ago

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321272

dang 7y ago
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20178799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20178799

t0mas88 7y ago

The proposed frequency is just above the aviation VHF band (108 to 136Mhz) so it makes sense to use it when aviation runs out of frequencies to use. However... EASA has made all aviation radios switch from 25Khz channel spacing to 8.33Khz channel spacing, essentially tripling the available number of frequencies for everything between 118 and 136Mhz. So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe). The US has some shortage (and still uses 25Khz channel separation), but they solved it by sharing frequencies between small airports.

throw0101a 7y ago
> So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe). This isn't about voice / ATC, but rather about up/downlinks for drones and such. From the background on the proposal: > The decisions of previous conferences have introduced some restrictions to the use and have imposed constraints on the development of aeronautical mobile applications within some existing mobile allocations traditionally used by the aeronautical mobile applications. > At the same time, the number of manned and unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors has grown significantly in the past 20 years together with the need of bidirectional low to high data rate communications. Aeronautical applications like fire surveillance, border surveillance, air quality and environment monitoring, traffic monitoring, disaster monitoring, terrain modelling, imagery (visible, infrared, radar, meteo), video monitoring require non-safety communications between various types of aeronautical platforms. > Consequently the need of non-safety data communications between various types of aeronautical platforms increases and so the need for new frequency bands. * https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-documents/file-history/?fid=51940 https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-...
- moftz 7y ago
  Why would you want to try to pump video over VHF? You have line of sight to everyone when you are in an airplane. Use a higher frequency band that allows for much more bandwidth and therefore higher data speeds. The little 1.2GHz video transmitters can easily reach 10km. That is cruising altitude for a commercial airliner. Having the proper license would get you even greater distance with a higher transmit power. Have the drone/UAV transmit ADS-B data and use GPS position to point a high-gain directional antenna at it, that should get you even more bandwidth.

RappingBoomer 7y ago

the ISPs are likely using ham radio as a weapon to fight against liberalization of radio freqs, which they see as possible future competition

curiousfab 7y ago

The fact that there was little opposition was partly due to the short time between the submittal of the amended proposal by France and the meeting itself. Here's some background by someone who is well connected with the German authorities: http://mailman.pe1itr.com/pipermail/moon-net/2019-June/039773.html http://mailman.pe1itr.com/pipermail/moon-net/2019-June/03977...

PaulHoule 7y ago

I have this radio https://www.amazon.com/Yaesu-FT-60R-Handheld-Amateur-Transceiver/dp/B00Q1UYR1G https://www.amazon.com/Yaesu-FT-60R-Handheld-Amateur-Transce... which works on both the 2-meter and 70-cm band, particularly if you use this kind of antenna: http://hamuniverse.com/2mladjpole.html http://hamuniverse.com/2mladjpole.html I live in a poor spot for 2m, we have some active club repeaters. Someone is always listening on those repeaters, but they probably don't want to chat with you. The west coast has more VHF and UHF action than any place I have been on the east. There are repeaters with people who talk nonstop in English, Spanish, other languages. You hear people talking on 2m at 4:00 in the morning around Van Nuyes.

rsuelzer 7y ago

as an aside, I got my ham radio licence because of my interest in long distance microwave mesh networking. there is a group called aredn http://www.arednmesh.org http://www.arednmesh.org which uses wifi devices modified to run in the Amateur portions of 2ghz and 5ghz to create massive mesh networks. The lack of noise on our allocations means we can make really long connections. I personally have a 50 dollar Microtik dish that makes a 25 mile connection to a backbone node and get about 25mbps. If there are any HAMs that are reading this, or you want to become a HAM it's a fun project that blends computers and radio.

arwineap 7y ago
I seem to remember some issues around running anything encrypted on frequencies meant for the public, but I've always been interesting in citizen mesh networking. Is it legal, or just not enforced?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Karunamon 7y ago
  At least in the US, encryption of any kind on amateur bands is prohibited. Hams tend to be really good at self-policing, so if a curious person horns in on your traffic and discovers that it's encrypted, you can expect a knock on your door, if you're lucky from the guy that looked up your license from the public database (you're required to transmit your callsign at regular intervals) to ask you to fix it, if you're unlucky, from an FCC enforcement guy in a suit.
  - dmix 7y ago
    So if you can't run any modern internet what would you use the mesh network for? Some of Google's traffic charts show up to 90% of traffic is TLS in the US for Chrome users.
    - rsuelzer 7y ago

quotemstr 7y ago

Unpopular opinion time: spectrum is a limited resource. We shouldn't waste it on efficient analog technologies like conventional commercial and amateur radio. We've already ceased conventional broadcasts: that's a step in the right direction, but there's more to do. The entire RF spectrum should be devoted to LTE-like efficient, packetized, and secure communication. I'd make small exceptions for things like radio astronomy, but I don't think we should be squandering prime regions of the EM frequency space just to support transceivers that Marconi would have recognized.

Stratoscope 7y ago
I was talking with a friend the other day, a brilliant young software developer at Google, and the topic of ham radio came up. He said what really got him excited about it was the possibility of building his own transmitter from scratch, using individual components he could see and fully understand. I think that is something to encourage even in this day of LTE.
geggam 7y ago
The solar flare that eliminates all the modern methods appreciates your opinion
- quotemstr 7y ago
  People have been bringing up the solar flare electromagnetic boogeyman for decades. It's never been an actual problem
  - geggam 7y ago
    Maybe not your lifetime but it has happened and we have been damned lucky more than once recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...
    - 7y ago

throw0101a 7y ago

The official proposal if anyone is interested: > The decisions of previous conferences have introduced some restrictions to the use and have imposed constraints on the development of aeronautical mobile applications within some existing mobile allocations traditionally used by the aeronautical mobile applications. > At the same time, the number of manned and unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors has grown significantly in the past 20 years together with the need of bidirectional low to high data rate communications. Aeronautical applications like fire surveillance, border surveillance, air quality and environment monitoring, traffic monitoring, disaster monitoring, terrain modelling, imagery (visible, infrared, radar, meteo), video monitoring require non-safety communications between various types of aeronautical platforms. > Consequently the need of non-safety data communications between various types of aeronautical platforms increases and so the need for new frequency bands. * https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-documents/file-history/?fid=51940 https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-...

Sanzig 7y ago
The thing is, 2 MHz of bandwidth in VHF isn't going to help the vast majority of those use cases. The best you can hope for is low-rate telemetry in that band (since that 2 MHz is going to need to be shared with other UAV users, and the noise temperature at VHF is horrendous due to man-made interference). Those use cases more properly belong in the microwave bands. Why aren't they going after allocation in L-band and S-band? I also fail to understand why they need an globally coordinated allocation for this. Surely with GPS + cognitive radio approaches, a UAV could use a local allocation set aside for this purpose wherever it's operating?

kylehotchkiss 7y ago

I can't help but feel the amateur radio community could have used a rebrand for the internet age. I understand there's a lot of history but it's hard to get young people interested in being _hams_, a word that has not aged well. I got my licence about a decade back and really loved the technical pieces - learning about how radio waves worked, propagation with different bands, the ability to (try) to build your own modem with two radios and an Arduino, but when it came to actually talking to people on the radio... other people just wanted to talk about radios. It is really fascinating what you can do with 2m band radios. For those times and places where your cell phone won't work, digital modes on the new Icom radios look pretty cool. Being able to hook up a radio to a laptop to send something digitally still seems valuable and relevant! But the community branding could use some modernization to push those use cases.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> other people just wanted to talk about radios. I felt the same disappointment when I got into amateur radio just before the modern internet took off. I loved the idea of talking with people around the world and maybe even practicing some foreign languages, so I immediately set up a station for DXing. All those people from exotic foreign countries just wanted to make a few quick remarks about their radios. No one wanted to exchange any actual culture. But to be fair, the wording of amateur radio regulations in many countries suggests that hams should not try to have substantial conversations over the airwaves. Also, since amateur radio is hobby dominated by older people, a lot of hams in Eastern Europe still remember the Communist era when contact with foreigners was supposed to be strictly business.
- madengr 7y ago
  Well at least with SSB and CW you have a short conversation. JT8, etc, have reduced “contacts” to a few bytes. Don’t get me wrong, pushing the Shannon capacity limit is great, but I’ll wager many stations are not even running QRP for the newer digital modes.
  - lawfulcactus 7y ago

msisk6 7y ago

From the ARRL: http://www.arrl.org/news/restraint-urged-in-response-to-2-meter-reallocation-proposal http://www.arrl.org/news/restraint-urged-in-response-to-2-me...

saul_goodman 7y ago

There's a lot more to this than simply taking spectrum away from hams. This potentially affects other ham bands too. The allotted spectrum for ham use was designed intelligently to reduce (though not completely eliminate) the chances of hams accidentally clobbering folks outside of a ham band with harmonics. So for someone operating in the 10 meter band (28-29.7MHz), the 2nd harmonic is the 6 meter band (50-54MHz), the 8th harmonic is the 1.25m band (220-224MHz) and the 16th harmonic is the 2 meter band being discussed. The closest band to cause interference on the 2m band would be users of the the 1.25m band though as the 2m band is the 2nd harmonic from it. Also, this is why the 2m and 70cm bands (144/440MHz) are commonly included on the same radio: one antenna can sort-of work for both bands. The antenna is tuned for the 2m band and that means it will also radiate 3rd harmonic excitations as well (the 440MHz band is the 3rd harmonic from the 144MHz band). So it works decent for 2 meters and as a crappy but acceptable 70cm band antenna. The only casualty is the 2nd harmonic band between them at 288MHz which is not allocated to hams. But anyway, there's no "type acceptance" required for ham radios because that allows hams to build their own gear and not just be appliance operators. Thales is setting themselves up for a lifetime of potential problems if they manage to crack open the 2m band for commercial use. Lastly, I will say that this is from the US perspective, I'm less well versed in ITU regions and bands available outside of the US. Thanks.

tlrobinson 7y ago

There are millions of these radios in the hands of both licensed hams AND unlicensed preppers/airsoft players/etc who bought their $25 BaoFeng radio on Amazon. Thales wants to reallocate the band for autonomous drone operations. What could possibly go wrong?