Side note: Actually visited the RSGB offices when I got a British reciprocal call sign prior to operating over there. Absolutely great bunch of people. Amateur radio is a true bridge between nations, races and sexes.
This appears to be pushed through by France at the behest of Thales [1], a large and diverse manufacturer of civilian and military tech that, among other things, builds UAVs and aeronautical communication equipment.
This portion of the band is allocated globally to amateur radio, and is not assigned to any commercial or (formal) public safety use. This likely makes it a valuable and easy target for reallocation for an entity wishing to operate on it globally.
I wonder why Thales can't target some other band? Are they hoping to jump on the wide variety of radio gear already made available for this band at low prices?
VHF may be desirable because it penetrates objects and buildings well, has dozens of km of range, and typically propagates line-of-sight instead of groundwave or skywave.
But the VHF band is nearly full [1] of existing allocations for public and commercial interest, like FM radio (87.5 - 108 MHz), air navigation (108 - 137 MHz), Marine VHF (156 - 174 MHz), with broadcast television channels slotting on either side on a variety of frequencies. Here's a US allocation chart too [2]. The 144 - 146 MHz interval in question is reserved for amateur radio throughout the world, being one of the very few remaining slots in this band that has the same exact purpose around the globe. This universality makes it valuable, both for amateur radio, but presumably coveted by commercial interests as well.
If they can achieve a reallocation, the frequencies' existing users will be kicked out, giving them a nice and empty slot in the VHF band. Currently, operating on this band requires a license, and if it's reallocated, presumably not many licensed operators would infringe on the band in protest, as they could lose their license and be prosecuted for unauthorized transmissions.
Why not go after FM radio frequencies? Dab+ can replace them more efficiently, like dvb replaced analog tv. Yes, it will annoy drivers of old cars for a while. But there's a lot more bandwidth there: 20MHz compared to 2MHz for the VHF in question. And FM is a global range AFAIK
The loss of this band would really hurt ham radio. The cheap Baofeng VHF radios that use this band are probably second only to the RTL-SDR for enticing people into the radio hobby.
It would be pretty easy to move all the current VHF activity up to UHF if you have the equipment, but a lot of tech class (or the European equivalent) hams that only have a cheap handheld are going to need to buy a new radio. That’s going to be a bummer.
It's "easy" to move, but not cheap - particularly for all the clubs which have thousands invested in 2m repeater hardware.
There are many thousands of repeaters around the world, worth hundreds or thousands of dollars each, mostly in remote locations or on private land, and almost entirely funded and maintained by volunteers.
The loss of this band would definitely hurt ham radio!
This varies on the region. 70cm here in the midwest and mountains is nearly empty, and 2m isn’t completely full. If you combined both you would have an exciting band. The downside is that there won’t be a whole lot of space to expand in the future. I’m sure that on the east coast it’s a different story.
But gaining an exciting and active band is probably not worth losing 2m, and I’m sure that once 2m is gone in Europe it will be on the chopping block in the USA.
The French are sell-out idiots. 6 out of 12 representatives are from Thales who has wanted more frequencies on the air band for years because of their drone business and also have interest on the space industry.
The Galileo project should've never even be close to 1.2GHz but apparently they need the band and it's too late to change. Since filtering is too expensive it's cheaper to just take away from ham community...
This said, if they do get it their way there's gonna be a lot of interference on 2m.
Not only limited to amateur radio novices who are new to the hobby; during emergency/disaster relief, the 2m VHF amateur bands are the among the most used bands due to how inexpensive the radios are. By creating an ad-hoc network used as a failsafe when cell towers and internet services could be offline for an indefinite period of time, civilians are able to save lives when police and and EMS are allocated at their capacity. I also personally enjoy using these bands because it's able to travel well throughout a medium-large city fairly well on a clear night.
It seems like a bad thing for a few reasons and is going to detrimental to ham radio users - especially the more novice ones.
From a purely practical level it seems like a crazy idea, for no other reason than the huge amount of cheap equipment that can broadcast over it. I'd describe it as almost too polluted to be used reliably for anything else.
Unless I'm entirely misunderstanding the article, this seems really serious. Like contact your radio clubs and lodge official complaints serious. Can anyone shed more light please?
Most of the radio clubs here in the US have been griping about this for the last three months. It's just a question of how much pull the european clubs have.
I never like to see Amateur Radio lose spectrum. But if I'm not mistaken 3300-3500 MHz is currently allocated to Amateur Radio. So this would still leave hams with 3300-3450 MHz.
Except for the fact that Channel 1 bleeds into almost all of the amateur 2ghz band. The center frequency puts the left side of the channel into our band and has made it a mess.
For those interested in how these frequencies are used by HAMs check out http://www.arednmesh.org. We hack routers and wifi point to point links to operate on those frequencies to build out large mesh networks.
> The decisions of previous conferences have introduced some restrictions to the use and have imposed constraints on the development of aeronautical mobile applications within some existing mobile allocations traditionally used by the aeronautical mobile applications.
> At the same time, the number of manned and unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors has grown significantly in the past 20 years together with the need of bidirectional low to high data rate communications. Aeronautical applications like fire surveillance, border surveillance, air quality and environment monitoring, traffic monitoring, disaster monitoring, terrain modelling, imagery (visible, infrared, radar, meteo), video monitoring require non-safety communications between various types of aeronautical platforms.
> Consequently the need of non-safety data communications between various types of aeronautical platforms increases and so the need for new frequency bands.
Not really. The space over Europe isn’t governed by Europe, they’ll just have to tolerate the transmissions. But lots of ham satellites are repeaters, so they’ll probably get a lot less activity over Europe, and nearby hams will probably get fewer European contacts.
https://www.change.org/p/rsgb-stop-the-2-meter-band-144-146m...
Side note: Actually visited the RSGB offices when I got a British reciprocal call sign prior to operating over there. Absolutely great bunch of people. Amateur radio is a true bridge between nations, races and sexes.