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To: Charles Brown who wrote (35865)	9/24/2010 2:36:55 PM
From: fred g	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Good catch, Charles, though perhaps WiFi on Valium is a better description of this snoozer. What's most surprising is how little has been changed from the 2008 rules, which were a huge flop, and how much hoopla they're making over these tweaks. The biggest change is that they got rid of the spectrum sensing requirement, and with it the 10-meter minimum antenna height. So it is at least possible now to put a radio up someplace, like on a house. It will however require the databases to be up and running; non-sensing radios will need to check the database daily. The good news is that they didn't adopt the broadcasters' request for 15-minute pings, which Harold Feld cleverly dubbed a DDoS attack. So once the databases are up and running, we may see a little bit of use. What they didn't do for the WISP crowd: Anything else. Power limits were not raised, but slightly lowered in practice by defining it in spectrum density terms (4W ERP per 6 MHz, or 2/3 mW per kHz). Even worse, the 30 meter height maximum was left in place, and added to it was an absolute ban on fixed-station operation (anything over 100 mW ERP, or below channel 21) at any location where the ground is more than 76 meters above average terrain. That's based on the ancient broadcast measurement technique, 8 radials from 2-10 miles, hardly relevant to this. So if you live on a nice hill, or in a hill town, or even in a high-rise, you're shut out. I checked this in five "unserved" Western MA forested hill towns that really could use this technology, and all have homes excluded by this; two towns have quite a large share of town excluded. The wireless mic stuff was a good compromise. They recognize that (mostly 200 kHz FM) mics need their reserved space, and made some available, but if an event requires more than 2 channels, it may require putting a request into the database a day ahead of time. They didn't widen the (1km) protection zones around them. If an event has a wide geographic area (like a big stadium or race track), then it can enter multiple points as separate protected locations in the database.