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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."
We've seen this several times along the campaign trail this year, and we're likely to see it several more. Try interrupting a candidate by yelling anything while he's trying to speak, and you're going to get thrown out of the venue.
See, the owners of the venue have the right to decide who gets to speak on their property, and to throw out the people they don't want there.
This sort of thing is the best way to get something through to the public. What's more likely to get people interested: pages of plain text or a comic strip?
Norml have some excellent comics which do exactly the same thing: put across an issue in an interesting way.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I read an article a few years ago that said that Italy allows anyone to open a radio or tv station that wishes to do so.
According to the article the results were pretty interesting. An enormous choice of things to listen to, some with really limited interest to most of us. One example the article gave was a 24 hour Hare Krishna station broadcasting nothing but chanting 24 hours a day.
I've long wished that the same rights were available in the U.S. If the law was changed tomorrow, I'd be in the market tomorrow for the equipment to set up my own radio station. If it could reach 20 miles, I'd be happy.
For the most part you can have my "right to receive". When I tune across the spectrum, >95% of what's playing I don't like to hear. Ergo, I don't listen to the radio ror more than 40 minutes a week in toto -- well, with one important exception: I gotta have my "Off the Hook" which is available at 2600.com. You see, they are supported by the listeners, and not corporate interests. (I really need to send some money to those guys.)
I'd totally be willing to listen to some pirate radio if they played the music I like to listen to.
Much like there are laws regarding abuse of speech, it would be easy to make common sense laws about abuse of radio. Somewhere upstream of this post is an example of taking a loudspeaker out at midnight and seeing if they regulate speech. Yes, speech is regulated: destructive uses of speech are not allowed. It also makes sense that uses of airwaves that do not materially harm others should be allowed. Note, while I said it would be easy, that only means physically easy. However, the modern framework of government makes it impossible to pass common-sense laws. There are always more than enough people opposed to anything relating to common sense to derail them from passing.
Your example about broadcasting noise at inordinately large power levels in order to block regular signal would fall under abuse of spectrum. Since it's pretty easy to track a signal back to its source, it's pretty easy to keep most abuses in check. This, of course, is not a complete solution for the same reason that sound ordinances are not. You can have someone driving around who the police never find. Same with spectrum abuse. It's just something people have to live with though. Nothing is a truly complete solution, and iron-fisted regulation is worse than many other possible results...
I don't think regulations (being mostly administrative and bureaucratic in nature) are ever really necessary. Just simple laws written to allow damages and penalties for abuse. The law is not an appropriate medium for detailing all possible uses and how they should occur, nor are bureaucracies. It IS appropriate to outline what is considered abusive behaviour, or steps to identify abusive behaviour within a (socio-politically) accepted context. It'll never be quite right, but then the law is rarely entirely right, and often entirely wrong.
Not that it really matters. Most people will be sheep most of the time. They baa amongst themselves without any real effect, taking sides among those who actually follow through. The few people with integrity AND a clue AND the willpower will attempt to fight the influence of the few people with no integrity who lust for power (and the few with no clue who blunder into power). That's been human history, and there are no signs of it changing.
I gotta have my "Off the Hook" which is available at 2600.com. You see, they are supported by the listeners, and not corporate interests. (I really need to send some money to those guys.)
The entire radio station (WBAI in New York) is listener supported. The great thing about Off the Hook is that almost all of the shows since the beginning are available in mp3 (there are a few shows that have no known recording). So you can listen to Off the Hook from 1989 onwards. I'm up to Oct 1992.
Don't reform the FCC. Auction off frequencies, with permanent ownership rights, to the public!
Oh, for fuck's sake, do we have to apply the property meme to every fucking thing humanity discovers?
Shiny rock? Mine! Sexy mate? Mine! Territory? Mine! Land between fences? Mine! Prisoners of War? Mine! Novel? Mine! Audio recording? Mine! Right to build a telephone? Mine and mine alone!
OBEY, proles. I own all.
Et cetera.
"The line must be drawn here!"
- Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Abolishment of private property might be a bit extreme, but can we please stop inventing new forms of it? It's not benefitting anyone.
None of the great innovations, discoveries, or achievements in human history were made for material gain.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Actually it is quite rare for people to go to jail for intentionall jamming. There have been two cases this year that I recall, and the involved multiple (30+) cases of jamming local law enforcement frequencies before they took action. One guy in LA is notorious for doing it, has even been to jail for it once, and continues.
In my jurisdictional area we have a guy that jams amateur frequencies any time they are being used to assist in emergencies. The amateurs working these situations are Disaster Service Workers under CA Office of Emergency Services and are either ARES or RACES affiliated, and he jams the nets. Our local law enforcement wanted to act, but it is a federal issue, so we gave it to Riley Hollingsworth at the FCC. After months of proof being sent in for review, swore statements by multiple officers that witnessed the crime, Riley sent a letter and told him to stop. Nothing ever came of it, it was a waste of time for everyone.
I wish people would actually go to jail for these things, but they normally don't. So go ahead, jam anyone you want, apparently the FCC only cares about getting money for the bands they can and never spending it on enforcement.
Nick
Butte County Sheriff Communications
[not presumed to be a statement of my employing agency]
If you set up a "pirate" station at low-to-medium power on an unused frequency the FCC can shut you down.
That's because it probably interferes with another licensed station (not necessarily in the FM band -- ever hear about harmonics?). Otherwise, that frequency would be allocated to somebody else.
It's a crude and inefficient regulatory system designed to work with receivers using 1930's technology.
Most receivers still use something pretty close to 1930s technology. Your basic radio receiver hasn't changed THAT much.
Your cellphone doesn't interfere with mine even if we're next to each other.
Sure, but that only works as long as there are more available channels than cellphones wanting to use one. Ever hear of Shannon's law?
We could even be on the same frequency
Only if you use TDM and there is more channel bandwidth than you can use.
The article tries to make the point that we have technology like cellphones today and can start regulating on the basis of "follow the rules of the road" rather than letting 1935 receiver technology force us into "only one car on the road at a time".
Use more analogies, see where that gets you. Unfortunately, that isn't how the physical world operates. The radio spectrum is a limited resource, and there isn't enough room for everyone and their dog.
from their site "The Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum."
...after all, for all we know, next month they'll get hired by neo-nazis and start promoting death camps and slavery!
and they're funded by "public intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." Although if these "intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." are so public, why don't they want to publicly put their names to this organisation.
It seems to me that they're a professional political lobbyists - guns for hire, if you will - but who pays their wages? I don't like the idea of raising the profile of an organisation without knowing exactly who they are...
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Well, open investigations leads me to not want to talk in details, but public knowledge is that he has a combination of grudges against the people using the frequencies as well as physical disabilities that leaves him little other entertainment than his radio.
For people that he doesn't have bad past history with he is decent with on the radio. I wouldn't call him a bad person as much as misaligned. While jail time probably wasn't the best solution for this case, I believe a temporary revocation of his radio license would have sent the message that the behavior is not acceptable and personal issues should be resolved in other ways.
On the other hand, I was once trying to radio in a bicyclist down on a back road and requesting medics respond and I was jammed. We belive it was "our guy" by signal strength readings from around the county during the incident and he has history of jamming the person I was reporting the medical call to. That case we don't have enough to legally proove it was him or not, but it sure made me mad either way; whoever did it directly delayed medical attention to an injured person.
Never underestimate the power of those little Radio Shack walkie talkies. Place one of them close enough to the recieving point and all of the victim's "CQs" will be for nothing. You can have all the power in the world to transmit, but if there's a 400mw transmitter deadkeyed on your home channel half a block away, you aren't recieving anything. It takes only a few minutes to change the TX crystal, and with a few D cell batteries the damn thing will be on for a week or more.
Then there was the guy that just went and cut about 18" off the other guy's RG-8. That stuff is a pain to splice.
With all the new uses of radio waves coming, won't we be bombarded by too much radiation? If every frequency just about is being used, that must mean a lot of electron particles flying through the air and through our brains and asses. (Please no jokes about goatse sitting on a cell phone.) How far are we from dangerous levels at this time?
Table-ized A.I.
Only if you use TDM and there is more channel bandwidth than you can use.
Actually CDMA can support a large number of phones on the same frequency. I don't remember the average number, but its something like 16 or 32 per frequency. Walsh codes are a very cool thing.
Nowhere close. Radio waves cannot effect electronic transitions in DNA. Period. At that point, it has to be a massive radiation density argument, and the W/m2 created by radio transmission isn't even in the ballpark.
This is one thing that doesn't cause cancer, regardless of what the talking heads on the news would lead you to believe in the name of ratings.
I dunno. Ask your friendly neighboorhood butcher's son? Although, I'm pretty sure that the cows and pigs don't agree!
These guys just don't get it.
No, you don't get it. There have been previous slashdot stories on the subject.
Loud speakers are regulated too.
Exactly! And they want SIMILAR sorts of regulations on radio! There is no objection to reasonable regulations on volume. People shouldn't be throwing out a hundred-kilowatts of radio any more than they should be driving around with a 200 decibel car.
These are just outlandish comparisions that don't hold water.
Yes they do. If they seem "outlandish" it's only because you aren't familiar with the science and because they they wrote it as a cartoon for public consumption. Everything they wrote is based on REAL PHYSICS and REAL radio technology. Radio and sound really do behave in almost exactly the same manner and their comparisons, though simplified, are reasonable. You just have to go to other websites if you want to get into the physics and engineering.
Particularly important is pages 2-3. They reffer to the difference between OLD-DUMB radio and NEW-SMART radio. FCC regulations are based on 70 year old dumb radio technology. New smart radio technology is simply no longer confused by many forms of supposed "interference".
A dumb microphone cannot distinguish between two conversations going on at the same room. Dumb radio. According to FCC rules only one person can speak at a time. Hook up a brain to a pair of ears and you can be standing in the middle of a cocktail party with a dozzen people speaking at once and you can mentally "tune-in" to whichever conversation you want. Smart radio. You still need volume limits, but many people can all speak at once.
Hell, some forms of supposed "interference" actually IMPROVE smart radio reception. Old-dumb radio has to crank up the volume to shout over multi-path interference. New smart radio actually gets BETTER reception from multi-path interference. New smart radio actually gets to talk quieter because of multi-path interference, rather than shouting louder like old-dumb radio.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Um, wrong actually.
You're wrong, as is anyone who conflates "spectrum" and "bandwidth".
The latest research shows that in networks of smart transmitters/receivers, if you use all the available tricks, the total bandwidth of all the participants goes up proportional to the number of nodes in the network
And also, if everyone became vegetarian, world hunger would end.
If you're suggesting a fairly high level of technology be mandatory for every radio, then that is just a different approach to advocating for government regulation.
Smart networks will be crippled if someone fires up a large homebrew antenna, so there still must be regulation to protect spectrum and ensure bandwidth.