20,000 watts!? The industry's petition is here: <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1042840187330/1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1042840187330/1</a><p>The petition requests "maximum transmitter power is 20,000 watts RMS" in the HF 2 – 25 MHz range. Wow. 20 kW is a LOT of power. Two amateurs in HF can talk to each other on opposite sides of the planet with 5 W and a tiny rig and a lot of skill. I think most amateurs would consider 100 W a lot of power for competent HF comms.<p>But American industry wants 20,000 W for coast-to-coast jibber jabber? Greedy. Lazy. And pollution.<p>The headline petitioners are:<p><pre><code> Eric Bellerive on behalf of DRW Holdings LLC
Thomas Maxwell on behalf of IMC Trading
John P. Madigan on behalf of NLN Holdings LLC
Kevin Nielsen on behalf of County Information Services LLC,
an affiliated company of Optiver Services B.V.
Tom Proudley on behalf of Tower Research Capital LLC</code></pre>
Anybody know how difficult it is to file an FCC comment?<p>Amateur radio aside, this would likely have adverse impact on several scientific research fields (e.g. ionospheric radars, 21 cm cosmology, radio-detection of energetic particles), including some things I'm interested in. While HF is already a mess, when adding even more energetic transmitters that will be seen all around the world, the benefits should be be weighed against the potential impacts....
From the petition:<p><i>> Licensed use of 2-25 MHz Band frequencies as proposed in this Petition would enable financial firms, including firms like the SMC members that act as market makers, to improve efficiency, increase liquidity, and reduce transaction costs in the financial markets in which they participate, thereby benefiting all market participants.</i><p>I am generally sympathetic to commercial use of spectrum, but allocating this band to prop firms doing high-frequency trading is fucking nuts. Can we please use this spectrum for something that actually contributes anything real to the world?
If they could be required to use a publicly known format for their transmissions, with no restrictions on reception of said signals for any purpose, them I'm all for it.<p>Having some known fixed beacons spewing transmissions that could be received and then used to recover the source information before encoding, would turn all of the transmitters into a wide-band source of probes for the ionosphere that we could all benefit from.<p>Knowing the format of the transmissions would also allow us to develop SDR software that automatically filters it out, completely. This would also allow us to use the same transmissions for passive radar, as all the transmission sites are fixed.<p>This could be a win-win for everyone, <i>as long as the format is fixed, and publicly known</i>. What they do with the data before sending it into the ether is their own business, I'm sure they could generate sufficient amounts of truly random bits and courier it between locations to use one time codes (a simple XOR, with almost ZERO delay) to keep their confidential business information safe.<p>20 Kw might seem like a lot, but the ionosphere is a fickle beast, and this isn't going to be completely reliable even at those power levels. It's only about 13 dB more than the most powerful ham rigs, and 3 dB less than most Clear Channel AM radio transmitters. It's not entirely unreasonable.
> Because radio frequency signals travel faster in air than does light transmitted via fiber optic cable, use of the 2-25 MHz Band enables transmission with a shorter delay than fiber.<p>wut