So, I attend regular US DoD E3 meetings—aptly titled the DoD E3 Integrated Program Team (IPT) and chaired by the Defense Spectrum Office—held monthly and attended by representatives of the four services, the DoD CIO’s office, the Joint Staff and others. A majority of the discussion these days centers on spectrum activity, rather than purely E3 discussion (those days are long gone!)—but that’s not surprising considering the level of attention on RF spectrum use. One of the things that is discussed at length is the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee (CSMAC); in particular, the activities associated with various working groups thereunder. And, unless you’re up to your eyeballs in the actual work, it’s hard to understand what the Committee is and what the working groups are up to. Fortunately, it’s very well defined on the NTIA website (thank you, Bing!):
“The Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee (“CSMAC”) advises the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information at NTIA on a broad range of issues regarding spectrum policy and on needed reforms to domestic spectrum policies and management to enable timely implementation of evolving spectrum-dependent technologies and services to benefit the public.”
The CSMAC charter was revised in 2011 to focus specifically on the implementation of the President’s Spectrum Initiative and how to repurpose up to 500 MHz of spectrum in the next decade. And since the you-know-what flows downhill, pretty much the entire DoD spectrum community and half the E3 community are busy analyzing the impacts that the loss of primary use of several major spectrum bands will have on their services’ systems. Here are the bands under analysis by the various working groups (working on just two bands of interest):
WG1: 1695-1710 MHz Meteorological-Satellite
WG2: 1755-1850 MHz Law Enforcement Surveillance, EOD, and other short distance links
WG3: 1755-1850 MHz Satellite Control and Electronic Warfare
WG4: 1755-1850 MHz Tactical Radio Relay and Fixed Microwave
WG5: 1755-1850 MHz Airborne Operations (Air Combat Trainings System, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Precision-Guided Munitions, Aeronautical Telemetry)
Their meeting minutes and the reports are published on the NTIA website. It makes for some interesting, if rather dry, reading, but that’s not the point. The point is that this information, including the concerns of various agencies, impacts to capabilities and potential options going forward, is all out there for whoever’s interested in reading it. It’s a pretty good example of “transparency” (where other parts of the US government fail miserably!) and an opportunity for anyone with a dog in the hunt, as they say, to better understand what’s happening in the spectrum world today. Specifically, with respect to spectrum use and repurposing (I love that word!). That will eventually lead us to better technology and hopefully more efficient processes and procedures to take advantage of the technology. It’s a very complicated big picture, one that I wish I understood better, and one which I hope the very smart people at the top of the spectrum food chain have a good grasp of.
-Brian Farmer
