On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 02:16:22PM -0800, Bill Swingle wrote: > So now that 2.4 Ghz is emerging in force; how long will we continue > to have FCC approved access to the 72MHz band?
Probably a long time. But they're a governmental agency, so who knows? Our channels are too small for FM voice transmission. They'd be useful for pager operation, but pagers have been largely replaced by cell phones anyways. If the FCC can take back the 72 MHz pager frequencies, then that 1 MHz chunk of bandwidth might be useful to somebody, but short of that, I don't see too much non R/C demand for our 72 MHz spectrum. And any new usage of the band will have to content with existing R/C gear still being used -- illegally if the band is given away, but does that really matter? However, the local Fry's sells toy helicopters on 72 MHz. It may be that in a few years 72 MHz is unflyable with any `expensive/breakable' plane due to the toy R/C planes/helicopters that have popped up everywhere. It seems quite likely to me that the R/C usage of 72 MHz band may be *increasing* rather than decreasing -- for every one of `us' there's a bunch of kids with R/C toys. They're mostly on 27 or 49 MHz for now, but this could certain change, especially once they decide that they need more than six channels ... -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
