Hacker News Reader

Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

The thing with 915 ISM is that it's not just crotchety old Elmer, K0LD, sitting his shack that you're screwing over.

Meshtastic devices are really starting to see uptake among techies in general, and in the US, the primary band they operate on is 915Mhz. It's to the point now that DefCon will put extra strain on the mesh and the project has to release patches ahead of time. If news got there this year, you can count on some jimmies having been rustled.

View on HN

For sure, some use 900MHz 802.15.4 equipment for industrial, agriculture, and environmental monitoring systems.

People need the lower frequency to punch though the water vapor, and can't get away with <14cm without cutting range.

Using it for 5G bandwidths is stupidly inefficient, as it will cap out at a few hundred users a cell. Maybe they are getting the bands for cheap... lol =)

It's honestly as stupid as that HFT shop that was trying to grab a bunch of shortwave bandwidth for god knows what sort of shenanigans instead of just building microwave towers or doing something else mildly more intelligent.

From the article: “ NextNav asks that the Commission reconfigure the Lower 900 MHz Band by creating a 5-megahertz uplink in the 902-907 MHz band paired with a 10-megahertz downlink in the 918-928 MHz band, shifting all the remaining non-M-LMS licensees to the 907-918 MHz portion of the band. Petition at 28–30.”

So at least all LoRa based applications seem unaffected by this. Though I don’t know how much traffic in the proposed NetNav bands will migrate to 915 MHz bands, crowding the spectrum.

I thought the LoRa "915 MHz" band ran from 902.3 to 914.9 MHz.

"The USA LoRaWAN frequency spectrum has 64 uplink channels available (125 kHz each) (channels 0-63) starting at 902.3 MHz which increment every 200 kHz up to 914.9 MHz. There are 8 additional uplink channels (500 kHz each) (channels 64-71) from 903 MHz which increment every 1.6 MHz up to 914.2 MHz." ( https://www.baranidesign.com/faq-articles/2019/4/23/lorawan-... )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com