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Television White Space Spectrum Approved For Use By FCC
New submitter ptmartin01 writes "The unused spectrum now assigned to television broadcast has been made available for public use by the FCC. This is going to be used for wireless applications (PDF) with implications that it will generate as much investment as the previous Wi-Fi spectrum. It also happens to be the last available spectrum to be exploited."
...I assume what you actually mean is "commercial."
It also happens to be the last available spectrum to be exploited.
There has to be a nicer word than exploited to use here.
What it is, I can't think of it off the top of my head, but exploited sounds so dirty.
Hopefully someone can clear this up for me.
Throughout the development of the "white space" spectrum, one thing that has never been clear to me is what it's going to be used for. It keeps getting compared to Wi-Fi, but then you'll have articles like this one that talk about commercial uses.
So which is it? Am I going to be able to drop a router in my house and run my wireless LAN on different frequencies, or is this just going to be another segment of licensed spectrum for selling wireless broadband?
There is a lot of whitespace activity in Europe. Here is one summary.
So what if I haul that old, dusty analog TV out of the attic, switch it on and tune it to one of these new applications? What will I see? Strange, weird pulsating patterns? Or garbled snow and fuzzy sounds?
Will I be able to tell the difference between that mess, and usual broadcast television content?
Maybe the old TV can be used as a Lava Lamp effect light? It would be interesting to see how the television circuitry tries to interpret these new application coded signals as television signals.
Probably like something SETI is trying to do.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That is incredibly interesting.
I really want to try this out and find out.
I'm certain someone knows exactly what frequency ranges are being discussed, but apparently no one (including the FCC) really want to make that information available. "White spaces" is a marketing term that doesn't inform.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I would say everybody here who has questions should start with researching The Telecommunications Act of 1996. Go from there...
The FCC could try to take away some of the amateur radio spectrum. Every now again they try to take some away. In so far they have not been successful. It is only a matter of time though. What with the number of new hams decreasing every year.
It'll be like the early days of scrambled pay channels. If you stare long enough, you'll see the occasional butt or nipple.
I Love Lucy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Probably nothing. If you tune that analog TV to a digital channel, you see nothing but snow, just like a channel with nothing on it. That's because an efficient use of the channel would look as random as the data in a zip file.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I remember that on analog cable some times the sound came in as well. Also I remember the day when the cable co messed up and had analog PPV unscrambled and I saw some movies for free to bad it was not adult movies.
Yeah, the higher the data rate, the more like snow it'll look.
For an example of this, listen to a fax transmission (or other phone line modem). The tone dialling at the start is simple enough for a human to learn to decode. Once the connection's made, the two modems start off at very low rates, producing clear, recognizable tones. Then over a few seconds they'll negotiate progressively faster protocols, which sound more and more complex until they're indistinguishable from white noise.
My parents live a mile off the main road at the bottom of a valley. No DSL, cable, 3g/4g, satellite, but with the help of a big honking antenna and a couple of amplifiers, they can pick up solid TV signals.
I'm salivating at the prospect of getting two of these radios and trying to set up a point-to-point bridge between their house and mine. The 145-225 MHz band out to be a lot more amenable to line-of-sight obstacles than 2.4 GHz.
If you stare at anything long enough, you'll see that anyway.
"The unused spectrum now assigned to television broadcast" .... NBC ???
So what if I haul that old, dusty analog TV out of the attic, switch it on and tune it to one of these new applications?
I have no idea but you just made me think, instead of recycling all of these old televisions, if somebody has one in great condition and keeps it, it would probably be worth something major decades from now. Or at least it would make an interesting museum piece. Or maybe it would just be old crap. Never mind.
If they can last decades without growing tin whiskers or having the capacitors fail the next time it's used is a different story. Up until earlier this month, I was using an old CRT had thad faithfully served me daily these last 10 years. All of a sudden, there was a loud POP and the TV shut off. When I tried to turn it on again, there was only a loud sparking noise and no picture so I unplugged it real fast. I'm guessing a capacitor blew. All I can do is guess since there's no way in hell I'm opening up a CRT... too dangerous.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
This DTV shit is for the birds, even with an external antenna and an amplifier the best I can get is 2 seconds of video with unsynced sound before the garbage freezes up for 15 seconds. Thanks Bush, sunk a hundred bucks into your bullshit little boxes and ended up getting fucking cable anyway so I can watch the god damned local news.
I just looked in the Denver Area using the Spaectrum Bridge system, there is 1 white space frequency available for use, all the others are already blocked by existing TV usage. that single 6Mhz slot means that at least in the denver city area trying to make use of "White Space" for networking is basically useless. I would like to see a map of the US with the number of channels available per 10 sq. miles plotted across the country. I'm guessing that there will be lots of bandwidth available where there are low population densities and little bandwidth available where most of the population is located. .
LOL. Looks like the RIAA shills are out today.
I would expect it to be similar to the channels that are now carrying digital tv channels. Both an unused channel and a channel that is now broadcasting digitally display a snow pattern, but the digital channel is distinct, still snow, but a different enough pattern that if you see both you can visibly identify the difference. That is unless the analog decoder replaces the snow with a solid color (like blue).
No. It hasn't. It's been made available for commercial use, following the long standing tradition at the FCC of giving the public nothing or next to nothing, and corporations everything.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For the same reason they keep trying to steal the amateur 70cm band (420-450 MHz in the New World, 420-440 MHz elsewhere): the propagation happens to lie in a "sweet spot" of being able to penetrate vegetation, buildings, etc with minimal loss, high power can be generated rather cheaply and easily, and yet there sufficient bandwidth to be able to do high speed data and what-not.
Further up into the microwaves (including mid and high-UHF) you get more bandwidth but attenuation and lower power generation (necessitating directional antennas for most apps) become problematic: witness the differences between the original 800/900 MHz cell bands and the PCS bands at 1700-2100 MHz.
Further down you start needing big antennas to do anything and man-made interference (static and such) starts becoming a real issue. Also, while VHF TV exists where it does for historical reasons, available bandwidth starts getting real scarce as you go down here. Finally, in the low VHF band (FM radio and below) you start seeing ionospheric propagation crop up which can be a nightmare for commercial uses (we hams love it, of course) and will probably be even worse for unlicensed users who will probably be stuck with lower power levels.
My guess is that the interference/big antenna issue will make low VHF (channels 2-6) useless in cities while in rural areas its use will be determined by available channels (a lot of translators are still on VHF even now). Possibly ditto for high VHF (7-13), especially in the number of channels still in use. ATSC has always done better on UHF so in cities where there are a zillion transmitters (half of them low power religious and the like), I can easily see the lack of white spaces being a big problem. In rural areas, the propagation isn't as good on this band, but still far better than 900 MHz+, so we'll see what happens.
One other question I haven't seen answered anywhere: what about Canada and Mexico? If the USA doesn't have some agreement with them on this (and I have yet to see one) none of this may be available in border regions (similar to the Line A and B issues on the 70cm UHF ham band along the US/Canadian border).
Elsewhere in Colorado, that system shows 4 white spaces for me.
But this strikes me as very odd. I believe there are about 45 TV channels available. Here, I can only think of about six being used. Even rabbitears.info only lists 24 TV channels in use in this market, most of which are repeaters absurdly far away from me. So why aren't there 21-39 white spaces available? Is it a case of interference around other channels?
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
I'm so glad to hear that the first responders now have all the spectrum they need and a cushion for unforseen future needs.
They did take care of that first, right?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Im still confused. I'm a ham, and here in the NYC area we have almost zero unallocated space. There are a few blocks of federal space that seem quiet or spread spectrum. How do you come up with a practical antenna that covers all the possible frequencies ? Trolling a cb radio board shows that antenna tuning is too complicated for the great unwashed. Hams spend a lot of time optimizing antennas using tuners and such. Wifi is transparent as antennas are not an issue. I don't see how any sort of efficient transmit antenna is going to spring out of thin air to serve all possible white space possibilities.....
I think the tin whiskers issues are a little overblown.... power supply issues and occasional dead caps can be a problem. Every antique piece of electronics I've resuscitated usually had power supply issues or blown caps near the power supply.... or unseated chips.
Some things surprise you though.... my old Atari 400 fires right up.
Opening up a CRT is only dangerous if you are careless. If you discharge the tube properly, the danger is minimal or non-existent. CRT repair used to be expected of techs. My money is on the DC power supply failing in your TV. Probably not worth repairing unless it was a really cool TV. I still repair CRT VGA monitors if they are really nice and the repair isn't very expensive. Solder and caps are cheap. I replaced a couple caps in my big Sony Wega HD CRT TV. Why? Because I can watch newer HD content AND my wife can play super mario brothers without it looking like badly upscaled garbage.
For a run-of-the-mill TV, I may not bother. If there was something special about it I might have a go at it. I actually find soldering and prodding at electronics relaxing. Especially old through-hole stuff.
Must be nice where your daily routine is to watch 15GB of video a day. Do you even work?
My street alone has enough potential subscribers to pay any company willing, 10 times over, to run access out here.
Including the company you would start?
What you hear at the start isn't data. It's both modems synchronizing with each other and doing a test of line quality. (Well, there's a little data there, but not data that comes from the data terminal ports of the modems.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }