ARRL Defends 902-928 Amateur Radio Band

09/12/2024
ARRL® The National Association for Amateur Radio® has filed comments [PDF] with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging that the 902 – 928 MHz amateur radio band be protected. ARRL joins hundreds of licensed radio amateurs who utilize the band in opposing a proposal from NextNav Inc., a licensee in the 900-MHz Location and Monitoring Service (LMS), to completely reconfigure the 902 – 928 MHz band and replace the LMS with high-powered 5G cellular and related location services.

Read more about NextNav’s proposal on ARRL News (8/15/2024)

ARRL’s comments, filed by our Washington, D.C. Counsel on behalf of ARRL members and radio amateurs, point out several problems with NextNav’s request.

“Contrary to NextNav’s assertions, the band is extremely crowded with millions of devices and transmitters in operation in multiple services, including the Amateur Service. Adoption of the proposal would result in either massive interference that would prevent proper operation or displacement to other bands. The difficulty is that there are no other bands known to be available, and in fact, some of the Amateur operations in this band are here because they were displaced when a portion of the 420 – 450 MHz band North of “Line A” was closed to the Amateur Service some years ago. Others were displaced from the same band when new Federal Government defense radars were initiated and continued Amateur secondary operations would have interfered with their operation.”

Pushing amateur radio out of heavily used spectrum is a risk to public service, ARRL argues in the comments.

“When space can be found in this band, Amateurs employ it to establish wide-area voice and some television signal repeaters. Others are actively experimenting with digital mesh networks and associated control links. These networks are a testbed for digital design and experimentation, but also are available and used for back-up emergency communications purposes. Still others operate low power beacons for propagation research. Weak signal work – tuning and experimenting to communicate over the longest paths with the least power – also is popular and leads to improvements in equipment.”

Mesh networks are becoming increasingly useful in emergency communications. Just this past week, the ARRL Utah Section announced that dozens of Amateur Radio Emergency Service® (ARES®) volunteers are working to expand the mesh network around the state. “The needs of participating agencies have evolved to require more than analog voice and low-speed data modes,” said ARRL Utah Section Public Information Coordinator Scott Rosenbush, K7HSR. “High-speed mesh networks using AREDN® [Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network] software will allow amateur radio to play a larger role in supporting these agencies in emergencies.” The ARRL Utah Section already has a five-county mesh network in place. The proposal from NextNav make it more difficult to operate networks like this one.

“Under NextNav’s proposal, the much higher-powered transmitters would be ubiquitous and operating 24/7. The resulting interference would effectively exclude many of the current Amateur operations that are operating in the 902-928 MHz band.”

The FCC docket remains open for reply comments from the public until September 20, 2024. As of September 6, over 800 comments have been filed by Amateurs and others who use this spectrum. The comments can be viewed at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ypxh583p. Click here for an ARRL Guide to Filing Comments with FCC. ARRL will continue to defend amateur access to this and other threatened amateur allocations.