Folks, this is last minute, but please take a look at the attached draft file, which I think is ready to go unless you have further changes to suggest. SE43 will meet 20-21 October and we should have input to that meeting if we want to be involved in the standards setting. Post your comments here, or to the email list, today if possible. Thanks. >BOB<

Futurezone Article: Freie Frequenzen für ein freies Netz:
http://futurezone.orf.at/stories/1628079/
Programme description (in German): http://oe1.orf.at/programm/200909277101.html
Announcement in ORF ON Futurezone: http://futurezone.orf.at/tipps/stories/1628086/

From the EU websites:

Member States shall make the 880-915 MHz and 925-960 MHz frequency bands (the
900 MHz band) available for GSM and UMTS systems, as well as for other
terrestrial systems capable of providing electronic communications services that can
coexist with GSM systems, in accordance with technical implementing measures
adopted pursuant to Decision No 676/2002/EC of the European Parliament and of the
Council of 7 March 2002 on a regulatory framework for radio spectrum policy in the
European Community (Radio Spectrum Decision)*.

We have submitted a response to the RSPG's consultation on the coordination of EU spectrum interest:

http://rspg.groups.eu.int/_documents/consultations/comments_spectruminte...

On July 4, 2009, OSA submitted a response to the Consultation (http://www.ez.nl/dsresource?objectid=164918&type=PDF) Open this item to open the attachment with the response.

The Open Spectrum Alliance gave a response on the digital dividend.

Futurezone.orf.at reported about us! I want to thank the students of the FH Joanneum in Graz who took a loot of time to do background research on this topic.

We submitted our requests at the Austrian "Rat für Forschung und Entwicklung". This is a plattform which tries to engage the public into a dialoge. Topics are the further agenda for research and development. The Rat then makes recommendations to the government.

A collection of links, comments and ruminations relevant to Open Spectrum.

Back in 2005, James E. Cooley looked at the (under)utilisation of the radio frequency spectrum in his master's thesis:

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33894

He isn't only documenting the utilisation of RF spectrum based on time, frequency and location, but also provides techniques for the detection of incumbent users.

So, most of the work necessary for my GNU Radio project on spectrum sensing has already been done...

Thanks to Andreas Müller for pointing me at this.

The people's party (ÖVP) in Austria (most notably Ms. Karin Hackl) is pushing for an open network access model. The ORF (national radio and tv broadcasting network) is reporting that ISPs with lots of empty cable pathways will be forced to open up these cables to competitors for a reasonable fee. We will still have to see what reasonable means but this would fulfill the dream of many small ISPs and might foster in a new era of competition.

Curious as I am, I bought myself GNU Radio hardware (USRP) quite a while ago. Now I've also bought a TVRX, RFX400 and RFX900. Check out Ettus research's website for more info on the hardware.

After a few nights of experimenting, I reinstalled my MacBook, installed MacPorts, all dependencies and the recently released GNU Radio 3.2 from svn.

After solving some stupidity I finally managed to build it last night and tune in to a local FM radio station ;). For listening to radio an investment of USD 2k in hardware might be a little overkill.

I'd like to experiment with detection of incumbent users as described on the tools4sdr web site...

My plan looks somehow like this:

Very nice article by Heise , summing up some of the open issues of the digital dividend discussion in the EU. However they quoted to much of the mobile phone industry. Sounds like the mobile phone operators want all of the spectrum but I doubt that they will actually do something with it.... after all... they already have some infrastructure out there. Why invest in something new when UMTS already works for them.