We Hams owe Bob N4HY and Gerald K5SDR a standing ovation at the next public meeting! Bob and Gerald defended Ham Radio when the FCC rules for SDR (Software Defined Radio) and CDR (Cognitive Defined Radio) were being formulated. The Federal Register stands as a testament to the power of their persuasive and well articulated arguments in front of such a demanding audience. In the message below, Bob recounts some of the encounter with the FCC.
Raise your glasses and join me in a hearty toast to Bob and Gerald for their unselfish work on behalf of us all. -------- Original Message -------- Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:13:59 -0400 From: Robert McGwier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List ***** Gerald Youngblood and I went to the F.C.C. and we gave a talk and discussed their proposed rule making. I believe you can see the impact we had throughout this document thought I don't claim we wrote any piece of it. We pleaded for them to not get in the way of a successful move of amateur radio into the almost inevitable future where larger pieces of it were done digitally with software and cognitive radios. We proved then, and we have continued to supply them and the ARRL CTO with information (ammunition) that shows amateur radio operators are doing INNOVATIVE development that is simply not being done elsewhere and much of it in SDR and CDR. One of the best papers you can find anywhere on the foundations for CDR (the mathematical tools) is in QEX and written by Frank Brickle, AB2KT! In the end, they told us that if amateur radio SDR's did not self police and provide transmit frequency protection, and removal of completely automatic scanning outside of amateur bands that we were likely to face serious certification of a type that would not be affordable. Now I know that faced with this, we could come up with open source means of authentication that would pass, but the expense would be onerous. I personally might personally be in serious trouble if I attempted to provide this. In the end, I think we are simply going to have to live with small pieces of firmware at a minimum that prevent unauthorized use of amateur SDR equipment outside of the amateur bands. Yes, we argued strongly that almost all amateur radio equipment could be easily modified to transmit out of band. I offered to bring in an unmodified transceiver and modify it in less than five minutes to show how easy it typically was. I was told that I should not volunteer to commit a crime on federal property and that they were aware of this. The F.C.C. is responding to external pressure from all sorts of quarters from the White House to commercial entities like Cisco to NTIS, and the intelligence community as well as D.O.D. The schizophrenic aspects of this are almost ludicrous. You find one D.O.D. office wanting to support you, buy yours toys, help you help them, and another wanting to kill the entire effort. It is bewildering. Given this order, which is now enforceable law since it was placed in the Federal Register, I expect more radio manufacturers to look at this order and jump into the SDR world more completely. I think that, overall, with these competing pressures, the F.C.C. struck a reasonable balance between the hysteria on the parts of some and the desires to reinvigorate amateur radio in particular but radio development in general in the U.S. One only has to visit places like the Wireless group at V.P.I. and other places to realize that S.D.R. and C.D.R. are having a major impact on the new engineers and communications scientists being trained at many universities. When Frank Brickle and I gave our S.D.R. course last fall, we had HALF of the entire senior electrical engineering class take the course and they did not know us from Adam's house cat and many were graduating, so it was a risk. That was impressive, not to mention a fantastic time. http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2007/01/24/101/?nc=1 73's Bob N4HY _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
