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Do you need spectrum for your business? There are several ways to acquire spectrum: buy licenses; lease the spectrum; win licenses at auction; or apply for licenses in currently unused spectrum. All of these require FCC approval, and the government always owns the spectrum. Unlicensed spectrum is also available.
Julian Gehman is experienced in all forms of obtaining spectrum. He has represented purchasers and sellers of spectrum licenses, lessors and lessees, auction applicants and unlicensed users.
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What Is Wireless Radio Spectrum?
Radio is a completely different technology from the type of software and devices that most people are familiar with today. The digital age has brought us many advances, but radio stands on its own as an innovation that continues to impact our lives every day – albeit in ways that we cannot always see.
When we talk about “radio” we talk about the process of sending and receiving radio waves – and perhaps more importantly, we’re talking about “modulation”. Modulation is the process of putting information inside of a radio wave and sending that wave to a receiver. At this point, the receiver “demodulates” the radio wave and extracts the information out of it.
The radio wave itself is called a “carrier wave” – a big wave – and you can use several different modulation techniques to put information inside the carrier wave. To make this even easier to understand, let’s use the analogy of an envelope…
If you take an empty envelope, seal it up, put a stamp on it, and address it properly, you can send it through the mail to the address and it’ll get there just fine. Doing this would be like sending a radio wave that has no modulation in it, you would just be sending the “envelope” of a simple radio wave.
Alternatively, you could put a letter in the envelope, maybe even a check, or a small shirt. Whatever you put in there, the envelope will allow it to be sent through the mail, arriving at its destination intact. This is what modulation does – it allows you to put music, video, or informational data into the “envelope” of a radio wave.
But let’s take this analogy a step further… Imagine that you stuff a shirt into a manila envelope. Of course, that will cause the contours of the envelope to change shape. Instead of holding a thin, flat piece of paper, you’ll have in your hands a slightly lumpy, more three-dimensional object.
This same thing happens with carrier radio waves and modulated information. Whenever you modulate a radio wave, it will change the characteristics of the carrier radio wave to some degree. This doesn’t alter the wave entirely, but it does affect a partial change that’s distinct enough to notice.
How Does Wireless Radio Spectrum Compare To Broadband?
The physics of broadband and radio are approximately the same. Radio is electricity, too, after all – so these two subjects join together at a fundamental level. However, the connection between the two splits after you pass the basics, as IT broadband is concerned largely with programming, and radio broadband is not.
Broadband applies to both the IT space and radio because the term “broadband” refers to the capability to transmit a lot of information at once. In the IT world, broadband means that you’re dealing with a large cable that can transmit a lot of information, or in more common terms – fiber optics.
When transmitting information via radio, on the other hand, you’re dealing with either “narrowband” or “broadband”. Here, narrowband means that you’re using just a little bit of spectrum to transmit information, whereas broadband means that you’re using a lot.
What Is The Wireless Radio Spectrum? What Frequencies Does It Include? And What Does That Mean For Someone Who Is Getting Involved In This Space?
The answer to all of these questions is somewhat of a moving target. The FCC allocates spectrum between 9 kilohertz and 275 gigahertz. However, scientists are always pushing the upper boundary, even into the terahertz range.
In the past, we used to use labels that you may have heard of before: Very High Frequency (VHF), Ultra High Frequency (UHF), and so on. This used to be the upper range, the very cutting edge of the spectrum.
Today, those same labels of VHF and UHF are now categorized as being somewhere in the middle, or even as a “low band” frequency. This is a result of the fact that the science behind wireless radio spectrum has progressed so greatly, allowing higher and higher frequencies to be used for different applications.
What Does “Higher Frequency” Mean?
Higher frequencies are determined by the number of cycles, vibrations, or rotations that radio wave make second. For example, one kilohertz is one thousand “hertz” (one thousand rotations) per second.
You can visualize this if you’ve ever looked at a sine wave in oscilloscope before. It continuous line to positive one, the down origin down to negative one, and make turn and back up the origin, up to positive one, and these down to origin and the down to negative one again.
The sine wave shows the up and down movement of frequency. Their higher frequency, to more times per second will “cycle” by moving up and down. For more information on FAQs About Wireless Radio Spectrum, initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling
(202) 341-0198 today.