There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.) and NDB beacons.

At least in VK/Australia, there’s the 2200 meter band, but it’s quite limited (1W power limit, CW/digital only, 135.7–137.8 kHz).

At the same time, as much as I don’t want the AM broadcast band to die, I’d love an amateur band in the lower/middle part of MF/MW.

> There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.)

I meant just the broadcast band 148.5-283.5 kHz. (Though I'd love if 2200m and 630m were just a bit wider.)

> and NDB beacons.

Good point[1]. So 148.5-200 kHz in ITU Region 2 (and keep LowFER allowances on 160-190kHz as a consolation prize.)

[1]https://www.dxinfocentre.com/ndb.htm

In the UK we have 2200m but it's 1W *ERP*, so you're probably running a good couple of kW to get there with any practicable aerial.

We've also got a chunk just off the bottom of MW around 475kHz, which ought to be good for long-range night-time communications. It's licenced for CW, QRSS, and narrow-band digital modes.

> Particularly time signals

Doesn't GPS utterly replace this?

Longwave penetrates buildings better than GPS and is harder to jam.

Many wall clocks and wrist watches (Casio WaveCeptors) plus cars set their times from radio.

In no way whatsoever, for low power devices.

I hate to rain on your parade, but a lot of interests want the low-frequency spectrum. It will absolutely never be allocated to amateur radio.

What are they wanting to build? It’s hard to put much information on lower frequencies, afaik?

I bet it will have to do with the military, almost inevitably.

With the risks to GPS becoming more acute, many jurisdictions are seriously entertaining bringing back a modern version of LORAN.

There's also high frequency firms that want to muscle their way into shortwave frequencies as they can have lower latency between trading sites (eg NYC and Chicago) since the physical infra isn't a direct link as the crow flies (as well as the speed of light being slowed in fiber optic lines). They've even restarted some microwave links, as they don't necessarily need a lot of bandwidth, just latency.

LORAN was actually pretty awesome.

It's not really much use for anything. What "interests" would you think are interested in it?

Already has been, although just small bits at present:

US 2200m band 135.7 - 137.8 kHz US 630m band 472 - 479 kHz

These became available in 2017 in US, following the agreement of the International Telecommunication Union's 2007 and 2012 conferences.

"Longwave" has no universally agreed defintion, but good news, amateur radio already has usage of 135.7 kHz to 137.8 kHz.

Building equipment that works on frequencies this low, and avoiding natural interference, can be extremely difficult.

Building aerials that work efficiently at 136kHz is difficult (although I have a croft that's approximately long enough for a half-wave dipole in NW Scotland, close to the sea for a good groundplane).

Actually generating the signal you could do with a moderately expensive USB soundcard, directly synthesizing it with simple VST-like plugin. Mad to think about, really.

I thought hams already had plenty of bands. Is there not one in this range?

There is a very small slice that amateur radio gets in this band, in theory it would be nice to have a bigger slice, but honestly, building antennas for this band to transmit anything worthwhile would be pretty hard.

My 7 Mhz antenna (MF, 40m band) is 67 feet long, and goes across by whole house.

The smallest antenna you could get away with for LF would be hundreds to thousands of feet long.

You might be able to go smaller if you enjoy suffering. Though, there are some pretty creative antenna designs that defy logic.

Does stapling it to your neighbours' fence lines and painting it like the wood count as creative?

I wonder if you can couple to your local distribution grid, and not get arrested.

I just string the antenna across my attic.

Coupling into my power upstairs is a bit of a problem sometimes though.

Pirating power is something I've heard that happens, but I looked it up, and couldn't find an actual cited example of someone doing it via induction.

Plenty of people doing it via extension cords and device tampering though.

> Coupling into my power upstairs is a bit of a problem sometimes though.

I haven't worked with my end-fed on 40m for a couple of years. We've recently all had our crappy old aluminium-cored BT lines replaced with shiny new fibre though, so this time I am unlikely to lift the coveted Worked All DSLAMs trophy ;-)

I meant feeding RF back into the power grid to use it as your very large antenna

You nerd sniped with this one.

I looked it up, and apparently utility companies already use the lines for comms, so you would be stomping on those potentially (depending on frequency).

As for radiating... Possibly... But the tuning seems ridiculously hard/out of your control.

The conductors are huge, and I can't imagine getting a stable RF standing wave across grid scale infra like that.

I'm sure it's possible... Those lines are actually too long and changing electrical length for most useful RF.

I'm going to have to dig a bit deeper though.

Here you go. https://theradiosource.com/products/antenna-630pd.htm

This is amazing.

I understand that while you can add substantial capacitance and inductance to make an "electrically long" short antenna for a long wavelength, its effectiveness at transmitting and receiving is still proportional to its size - the signal will be pretty weak?

Then I remembered the way these electrically short antennas work is by resonating the signal within themselves so you're basically transmitting a really high amount of power with a really low efficiency (and the rest stays confined between the antenna and its extra L/C loads until it gets transmitted).

Before Radio 4 LW was renumbered in 1988, it was 200kHz. And before the early 70s it was referred to as it's wavelength... 1500m :P

Best we can do is privatisation and selling it to a party donor.

LW-HFT all the wayyyyy!

- some cryptobro

/s

That'd be quite a challenge!

From a quick Google I see that HFT carries out trades in an average of 700ns, which is close to the cycle time of a 150kHz carrier, so you'd have to come up with some really clever phase modulation scheme that could carry meaningful data in *one single cycle*.

You're definitely going down the SDR route for that.

It's still technically "high frequency", just in terms of sound rather than trade volume. Also if it's some cryptobro's pet project it probably needs time to settle on some blockchain ledger, so extra reason to find a new meaning for "high frequency" like sound wave cycle to confuse the marketing on the project.

The witness of the conspiracy practice in me says that the opposite is more likely to happen in the world whose govenments strive to limit its ineterconnectedness and turn it into a set of isolated anclaves not unlike Orwell's Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.

The next logical step in that direction would be cracking down on HAM, not liberalization of it.

We'll see.