Publications

Pursuant to Section 6001(d)(4) of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act or Act) (Public Law No. 111-5), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) provides this quarterly report on the status of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is responsible for managing federal agency use of the radio spectrum. The NTIA establishes policies concerning frequency assignment, allocation and use, and provides the various federal departments and agencies with guidance to ensure that their conduct of telecommunications activities is consistent with these policies. The NTIA also serves under the Executive Branch as the President's principal adviser on telecommunication policies pertaining to the nation's economic and technological advancements and to the regulation of the telecommunications industry.

The purpose of this handbook is to provide the radio frequency (RF) analyst with the capability to calculate the effects of noise and interference on RF communications receivers. A receiver is modeled as a sequence of modules. Each module has a transfer function that relates the module outputs to the module inputs. By consecutively analyzing each module in the sequence, the analyst can then relate the receiver outputs (performance) to the receiver inputs (signal characteristics).

This report describes how the current frequency assignment process influences spectrum efficiency in the federal land mobile radio frequency bands. In light of the increasing demands for land mobile radio communications, federal spectrum managers must use frequency assignment methods that accurately represent interference to and from systems in the environment to ensure that spectrum is used efficiently. The results of this report will be used to support the implementation of an interference-based frequency assignment process that will improve spectrum efficiency. Standardizing the interference analysis methodologies used in identifying interference-free frequencies in the land mobile radio bands will also improve the overall effectiveness of the federal agencies in performing their missions.

On October 14, 2004, the Federal Communications Commission (Commission or FCC) adopted a Report and Order that defined new Part 15 rules for Access Broadband over Power Line (BPL) systems. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) contributed to the Commission’s work by providing analysis to support recommendations for refinements in the rules and measurement guidelines in comments and staff correspondence filed in response to the Commission’s earlier BPL Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). The NTIA Phase 2 study of Access BPL systems expands on its earlier Phase 1 study by providing additional modeling results and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of the FCC’s rules and measurement guidelines in minimizing the potential for harmful interference to federal radiocommunication systems under worst-case conditions.

This report evaluates the efficiency of federal spectrum use, performing a study that compares the spectrum resources used by several alternative land mobile radio (LMR) system architectures employing trunked radio technology to the spectrum resources used by the current conventional LMR systems.  This study considered the 162-174 MHz federal LMR band in the Washington, D.C. area.  The Washington, D.C. area was selected because it represents a spectrally congested environment and the 162-174 MHz band because it represents the most heavily used federal land mobile frequency band.

This technical memorandum documents the analysis methodology that NTIA developed and used in assessing interference from radio local area networks to 5 GHz radar systems.

This technical memorandum provides a methodology to determine the average and peak power level at the output of a filter with a linear swept frequency pulse train input to the filter. Using this method, peak and average power correction factors were developed that can be used compute the interference power level of a system that employs linear swept frequency signals.