We need to expand ISM license-free zones to facilitate experimentation and development, not shrink them even more. 902-925 is not ISM in Europe and it sucks. Don't let them take it from you over in the US!
What I notice when I travel with a scanner is that the US West Coast and East Coast are entirely different in terms of radio, that includes not just inland areas but also the area around New York City.
The 2 meter band for instance is back to back busy with people speaking English, Spanish and other languages in L.A. but if I scan for a while in NYC I’ll eventually hear two people talking on a repeater.
So far as I can tell startups in the Bay Area try to develop 900 MHz devices and come to the conclusion that the band is too crowded because every Stanford student and his uncle is testing some gadget they made. If somebody tried that in the Research Triangle Park area, however, they’d probably wonder if their receiver was dead.
So more products dogpile in the 2.4G band which is crowded everywhere.
The situation is at the most blatant where it seems the utilization of TV channels is much less than 10% on the East coat because our cities are too spread out for it to be easy to cover people but are too close together to be able to reuse frequencies. Thus you can get more channels than some cable plans with just a pair of rabbit ears in LA but it is not like that in NYC where reflections are so bad in the canyons I wouldn’t count in tuning into anything in Manhattan.
> Thus you can get more channels than some cable plans with just a pair of rabbit ears in LA but it is not like that in NYC
In LA I think part of that is the repeaters on every mountaintop in the area. Most of LA county and the Inland Empire have clear line of sight to the San Gabriel mountains and most of Orange County has a clear LoS to the Santa Ana mountains. Both ranges have peaks in excess of a mile above sea level.
Even before digital TV broadcast the VHF dial was full and there were a lot of UHF channels. I'd guess the Bay Area was similar as most of the population has a pretty clear view of some high peaks with repeaters on them.
Are the channels any good? Living in a high rise in Atlanta I could get 100+ OTA digital channels but they mostly sucked. What was interesting was the 4 or 5 channels I could get on Analog though, which I assume were some sort of pirate situation. All random Asian language programming.
I haven't lived in Southern California for about twenty years now so I can't speak to the current stations but in the 90s and early 00s I recall a lot of the UHF stations were foreign language. The English-language stations mostly aired reruns. So overall the plethora of stations wasn't all that attractive to me personally but the number was impressive.
Looking at the channel listings, there really is a huge amount of foreign language content in LA in a wide number of languages. Today is has to be more than it was in the 1990s because ATSC can fit multiple channels in the bandwidth taken by NTSC.
I'd contrast that to the Syracuse and Binghamton markets which I can both get most of the stations reliably where there are no foreign language channels but quite a few that show reruns of shows like Columbo, Farscape, That 70's show and such as well as news from the BBC and Japan.
and I can receive it indoors with rabbit ears in an old house which is full of little nails that interfere with radio. (Usually I use a small outdoor antenna, though it is hard to watch broadcast TV now that there is FAST.) People on the other side of Lake Erie in Canada watch for it DX when tropospheric conditions are favorable, on some of those days our repeater opens up an I can talk to them.
