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A comment on The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat.

Re:The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat by t0mas88 on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @10:35AM (#20335565)
The proposed frequency is just above the aviation VHF band (108 to 136Mhz) so it makes sense to use it when aviation runs out of frequencies to use.

However... EASA has made all aviation radios switch from 25Khz channel spacing to 8.33Khz channel spacing, essentially tripling the available number of frequencies for everything between 118 and 136Mhz. So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe).

The US has some shortage (and still uses 25Khz channel separation), but they solved it by sharing frequencies between small airports.

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Re:The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat by throw0101a on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @11:53AM (#20336292)
> So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe).

This isn't about voice / ATC, but rather about up/downlinks for drones and such. From the background on the proposal:

> 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.

* https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-...

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Re:The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat by moftz on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @12:32PM (#20336738)
Why would you want to try to pump video over VHF? You have line of sight to everyone when you are in an airplane. Use a higher frequency band that allows for much more bandwidth and therefore higher data speeds. The little 1.2GHz video transmitters can easily reach 10km. That is cruising altitude for a commercial airliner. Having the proper license would get you even greater distance with a higher transmit power. Have the drone/UAV transmit ADS-B data and use GPS position to point a high-gain directional antenna at it, that should get you even more bandwidth.
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Re:The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat by kawfey on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @12:59PM (#20337037)
This, to me, is why this request is so unusual. This is much more suited for spread spectrum, secure, short wavelength (smaller antennas) and the like, and its surprising that Thales - a world renowned avionics corporation - is behind the push. It's also why I think this big 2m band scare is moot; someone didn't actually do the engineering, it's like they just threw out a random number and put it in a powerpoint slide.
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