700MHz Kickout Notice

Pretty good article, although I'd point out...

-- The vast majority of those wireless users were never authorized in the first place, and were initially sold to (almost always ignorant) customers by unscrupulous professional sound companies. Over time it became a very well-known secret and -- since the FCC didn't respond -- an accepted practice even among nominally above-board companies. The FCC clamping down is unfortunately going to hurt some of those customers, particularly small vanues such as churches and schools.

-- The idea that a lack of spectrum is what caused public safety agencies to be unable to communicate with each other on 9/11 is almost entirely a red herring: The biggest factor is probably numerous proprietary, incompatble-with-each-other (often by design, to try to force vendor lock-in) radio systems out there. Indeed this is what prompted the APCO P25 standard, which began cookin in the '90s. Other difficulties with 9/11 is that, for any large scale situation like that, there's inevitably some amount of interference and desense when you have thousands of radios all end up in the same place at the same time. And finally, many of the radios didn't work particularly well just given the sheer height and reinforced-concrete nature of the World Trade Center building itself.

-- Those Public Interest Spectrum Coalition folks are really the "we want faster mobile Internet coalition." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, although I think that -- like almost all coalitions today, it seems -- the name doesn't accurately reflect what they really want.

---Joel

Thanks! That'll affect both Joerg & me, and possibly others in the newgroup. AFAIR, he's got Sennheiser in his church - mine's Shure. We'll both have to check the frequency to see if we need to replace them.

Ed

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If I may just add my $0.02 here... First, you're right. 700 MHz wireless mic were no secret at the FCC. The carriers (Verizon & AT&T mostly) want the mics gone so they can build out their LTE networks ASAP. It really doesn't have anything to do with Public Safety.

But speaking of Public Safety, I (respectfully) submit that one reason communications were so screwed up on 9/11 is that the WTC was the "Command Center" for the city's emergency network operations center. Well that, and the whole city is unionized. And the last thing you want is an "electrician" running coax for you. They don't seem to get the concept of "minimum bending radius", and stuff like that.

I was invovled with several radio projects on the 83rd floor at Empire. We would wait until after all the union guys left, then re-do their work. It cost 2X+ time & materials, but at least the radios would work. I offered to pay them to just sit around and do nothing, while we did the work, but they wouldn't go for it.

Wow! I thought it was bad when I heard a somewhat similar tale from a guy I used to work with -- albeit with PLC control/power wiring rather than coax -- but in that case the union guys *were* willing to sit around and "supervise" him doing the actual work.

A guy who did service in Australia was _summoned_ into the office where he was read the riot act because he had dared to do the unthinkable. He had closed up an electronics cabinet after fixing the electronics. Screwing the door back on was according to the union not the job of an electronics guy. The fact that the other guy would have had to drive tens of miles to the location left them completely unimpressed. The fact that no radio link was available out there and that dirt could otherwise get in was brushed aside as well, it didn't matter. Pathetic.

I got called on the carpet at MIT (Building 20 MHD Lab) for ordering a

Head of RLE (Research Laboratory for Electronics) calls me into his office, with a union steward standing there. Starts to chew on me. I interrupt him, "I'm a student here, you two can GFY!", and walked out. Never heard another word ;-) ...Jim Thompson

ehsjr schrieb:

Also, most of that gear is programmable so you can move it below 700MHz. Older gear may have to be re-crystaled and aligned but that's not super-expensive.

Yeah, thanks! I had done a sound system at the city a couple of years ago, and needed to be sure that the Shure mics I used weren't on the list.

Charlie