What the EFF, FAA? My Insanely Long Field Guide to the FAA/FCC 5G C-Band Fight

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2 pointsgormandizer3 comments

Aviation is becoming a backwater of technology.

They still use leaded gas for piston planes.

Their answer to global warming is to make ‘green’ jet fuel by using painfully slow and expensive Fischer-Tropsch chemistry to build up hydrocarbons rather than switch to something reasonable like alcohols, dimethyl ether or methane. Ground transportation is 20-30 years ahead of aviation in terms of sustainable fuels but in the backwater of aviation they are too afraid to make any changes at all in fuels.

This, in my opinion is an excellent text detailing how we arrived at the FAA/FCC C-Band face off. I believe it also answers many of the questions raised in this thread: "Boeing, Airbus executives urge delay in U.S. 5G wireless deployment" [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642222

I like it but was resistant to the glib claim contained in that ‘spectrum is scarce in the U.S.’.

I can’t speak for microwave spectrum but I know a lot about the land between 50Mhz and 1 GHz because I have travelled with a scanner and I can say that UHF/VHF is crowded on the west coast but practically fallow on the East coast. L.A. seems to have more hams speaking Cambodian on the 2 meter band in a few blocks of L.A. than you hear total in the NYC metro area. The TV industry killed whit spaces because there are no white spaces in LA (get 100+ digital sub channel with a cheap antenna) but even in ‘crowded’ New England you find that the nearest city is too far to get good reception but too close for them to put a transmitter in closer to you. It is almost all white space on the east coast even in crowded areas…. Go to the mountains 200 miles inland and it is a RF dead spot bigger than most countries.

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