Spectrum Engineering

As part of NTIA’s ongoing effort to identify candidate bands for repurposing to accommodate commercial wireless services, NTIA selected the 3450-3550 MHz band to study for potential sharing between federal systems and a variety of non-federal commercial wireless operations.  NTIA worked with the Department of Defense, which operates the federal systems in the band, to determine if commercial services could operate without causing impact to incumbent operations.  The report indicates that commercial operations would impact incumbent federal systems; however, spectrum sharing may be possible that provides both sufficient protection to incumbent operations and attractive opportunities for commercial business – subject to further analysis and deployment of innovative time-based sharing mechanisms.

Keywords: radar; interference; spectrum sharing; 3450-3550 MHz; airborne radar

• Technical Report 20-546 (73 MB)

This report describes the 3.5 GHz Study. It explains the assumptions, methods, analyses, and system characteristics used to generate the revised exclusion zones for small-cell commercial broadband systems to protect federal radar operations (ship and land based) from aggregate interference in the band 3550–3650 MHz. The 3.5 GHz Study’s exclusion zones are compared with the exclusion zones that were generated in the Fast Track Report, which considered macro-cell operations.

Keywords: RADAR; spectrum sharing; FCC; NTIA; 3.5 GHz band; exclusion zones; CBRS; 3550-3650 MHz

• TR-15-517