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Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy
js7a writes "The New America Foundation has published The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy (pdf). An excellent 14 page guide that everyone should print a few copies of to have handy in the backpack or car. Learn what would happen if the government regulated speech the same way they regulate airwaves. Learn the truth about microbroadcasting, smart radio, and so-called intererence (all previously covered on Slashdot.) Learn more creative ways to tell Congress to stop giving away public resources to private corporations. Make the most of your rights to use unlicensed wireless, before it's too late."
Everybody has the right to transmit on the FM radio band!
What, you don't believe me? Just go to your local Best Buy or Circuit City location and look at the iPod accessories. You'll see several models of battery powered FM transmitters. Yep, you can plug those into to your iPod and go, no FCC license required, but batteries are not included.
Of course, the catch is that it has to comply with some pretty low power limits but that's the point. You're only allowed to affect the radios in your immediate area, not to set up a major broadcaster that'd interfere with the already licensed stations.
See, everybody else has the right to hear what the licenced transmitters are putting out, and your right to broadcast falls when it comes into contact with their right to recieve.
Actually, Part 15 of the FCC Rules outlines legal use of nearly every band in low-power situations.
They're very loose when you consider what we're talking about. You can broadcast on the 88-108MHz FM band so long as you keep yourself to a whisper. In fact, a "pirate" AM radio station on a college campus that manages to confine all of its signal to the campus area isn't breaking the law at all...
Here's a little tidbit of knowledge for you folks:
Modern FM receivers work by mixing a beat frequency with the frequency you want to receive. You wind up with (a+b) and (a-b), one of which is trivially filtered out with a high (or low) pass filter.
Now there's a nice, simple, standard design (and corresponding set of chips) for handling FM at a particular frequency. So given your target frequency (a), you can choose a beat frequency (b) such that (a-b) matches the standard chip frequency.
For standard US FM radio, that beat (b) frequency is right in the middle of the aircraft band.
Aircraft use AM for their comm gear.
So your little FM walkman receiver can jam air-to-ground comms.
That's a RECEIVER! Once you get into transmitters, it's really easy to jam everything around for miles. Not only on your frequency, which may be quite wide, but also on all the harmonics.
Take it from someone who used to jam his little brother's radio reception. "Turn it down or I turn it OFF!"
Last I heard the military is losing out to commercial interests as well. They're losing out on new freqs for expanded comms and radar to commercial interests. Main reason...government agencies are forbidden to lobby other government agencies. In the end the military is fighting for the scraps as well since they can't "contribute" (cough, cough) to the FCC's decision making process the way corporations can.
> Here is a primer on spread spectrum.
Key word being primer.
Look, Spread Spectrum isn't a magik nostrum to solve all ills. It makes it harder to actually intercept the signal but it raises the noise floor across the band it is operating on. Get enough devices operating and the noise floor comes up and smacks you. Toss the regulations and everyone starts cranking up the outpower and that floor will hit you pretty damned fast unless YOU crank up your power, which means your neighbors have to up THEIR power to overcome your contribution to the noise level, spiral out of control to madness.
Fact: Spectrum is not an infinite resource.
Fact: Spectrum, like every other finite public resource will be allocated in some fashion.
Discussing whether the current bandplan is sensible in the age of WiFi and other emerging technologies is a different debate, one I would love to get into; however there isn't much point of trying that in this thread:
1. This cartoon is a bunch of propaganda from some corporate consortium wanting to SELL lots of small RF devices who managed to tool some leftist think tank to make their arguments for them in terms of anti-corporatism. Kinda silly if you think about it. But with that sort of red meat hanging, the "down with authority" crowd is going to be out in force on this article.
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
Democrat delenda est