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.
>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?"
The curmudgeons are a minority, but a very vocal one.
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...
i'm doing my part!
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
I'm pretty sure that those few who might get into really do get pushed away by the people who still do it...
"Those boomers are ruining ham radio for us!"
It's the ciiiiiircle of life...
Goodbye Amateur Radio, you won't be missed.
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 LLCPower 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.
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
HF signals can be reflected by the surface of the Earth after hitting the ionosphere and repeat this process until they've gone around the world (sometimes more than once!). This is not a rare quirk; amateur radio operators take advantage of this on a daily basis, with an absolute maximum power limit of 1500W. (But 1500W is uncommon; my radio does, at max, 10W. And I can communicate with Europe from NYC fairly regularly.) The result of all of this is you have to be careful about HF signals; you can ruin it for everyone in the world if you make a mistake. VHF, whatever.
VHF does occasionally propagate over long distances. It used to happen with analog TV and was quite the rare and amazing sight to behold (I've never seen it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation#Tropo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation
TV moved from VHF to UHF during the digital transition, so this doesn't happen anymore.
Finally, there is a lot more VHF frequency available than HF. For example, one band that amateurs have is the 40 meter band, which is 7MHz to 7.3MHz. That is 300kHz of bandwidth for everyone in the world. Meanwhile, just 1 FM radio station is 270kHz!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Provided the transmitter is 'clean' and modulated such that the signal stays inside the allocated bandwidth, it will not impact other users.
(except if you are < 1 Mile from the transmitter. the poor selectivity in your receiver may be overwhelmed by this power up close).
The question is how much bandwith and what kind is the modulation? Narrow band modes consume less spectrum, and they also transfer less data.
A 50-100 khz band could be carved out of HF and given to this services. 500khz would be way to much.
And you cannot take it from the Ham bands. They were there first.
> 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?
Wouldn't they relatively be equal off if the latency for all firms was increased by say 100ms.
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.
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.
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....
And then put RM-11953 in the Proceeding(s) box.
Direct link to submit an Express Comment on the petition: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express?proceeding[name]=RM...
wut
Of course HF doesn't propagate "straight" so a direct comparison is not straightforward.
arrl.org does
But this is from high frequency stock traders. What are they planning?
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.
This is the mutant expectation of a company that's very existence hinges on fucking over legitimate human made trades.