Thursday, May 08, 2008

FCC Denies Miller Digital Bandwidth Petition

In a Report and Order in the matter of RM-11392, the FCC has denied a rule making petition by amateur Mark Miller regarding bandwidth and frequencies used for digital modes, especially by automatically controlled stations.

Miller's argument was that the adoption of wideband data and image transmission by new generations of computer-oriented hams would clog the subbands now being used for such older modes as RTTY. He asked for tighter limits on these, more or less rolling back the FCC rules to before 2006. He noted his awareness that this would also effectively ban Pactor-III and ALE, but that was the price of good spectrum management.

Most of the 650 comments were negative, and Miller's filing had been widely derogated as the "digital stone age petition." The FCC agreed that he had not made a good case that rule changes were necessary.