International Achievement Award for Radio Ham

Radio Amateur Matt Ettus, N2MJI has won the 2014 annually awarded Wireless Innovation Forum of International Achievement Award at the recent WInnComm 2015 event held in San Diego, California, USA.

The Forum International Achievement Award is presented to an individual, group of individuals, or organization that made especially significant contributions to international furtherance or acceptance of Software Defined or Cognitive Radio. 

Matt, N2MJI has utilised his company Ettus Research, now a part of National Instruments, resources as an innovatior in the Software Defined Radio community since he released the first Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) in January of 2005 with GNU Radio software support. 

Over the past year Matt Ettus has made significant contributions to the international SDR community with one of the most novel being RF NoC, an innovative network-on-chip based programming architecture that enables flexible and instantly reconfigurable FPGA acceleration for radio designers. This new approach improves the modularity of FPGA IP, improving reuse across designs.

The Wireless Innovation Forum is a non-profit international industry association dedicated to driving the future of radio communications and systems worldwide.

Wireless Innovation Forum Announcement - 
http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/570592-1427830733-wireless-innovation-forum-announces-2014-achievement-award-winners-at-winncomm2015-in-san-diego.html

Open Source CubeSat Projects

Fans of open-source amatuer / ham radio sotfware may be interested in downloading Librecube - a piece of software allowing Hams to freely modify, produce, improve, and share CubeSat products and projects.

They are hosted by LibreCube, a non-profit initiative that has the objective to promote open source CubeSat design and foster collaboration among the CubeSat community.

Download - http://www.librecube.net

UK Mobile Trading Regulations

Ofcom has published a consultation setting out plans to include 1452 -1492 MHz and former amateur radio allocations in 2350 - 2390 MHz and 3410 - 3600 MHz within the Mobile Trading Regulations

The proposed new regulations define the process for trading spectrum in specified frequency ranges that can be used for provision of mobile services.

In particular, they enable Ofcom to carry out a competition check before approving a trade of such spectrum.

The spectrum access licence for the 1452 -1492 MHz band is currently held by Qualcomm UK Spectrum Ltd. Qualcomm has requested a licence variation to help enable the spectrum’s use for mobile or fixed communication Network Supplemental Downlink (SDL) in the UK.

SDL is a new mobile broadband technology which, using a mobile base station transmitter network, provides additional bandwidth to deliver improved capacity for consumer mobile broadband services. Improved capacity can help service providers send more data to consumer devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, at faster speeds.

The 2350-2390 MHz and 3410-3600 MHz spectrum bands are to be auctioned under proposals for the Public Sector Spectrum Release (PSSR). As set out in previous consultations, we expect this spectrum to be used for mobile broadband.

In this consultation we are seeking views on plans to make two sets of regulations, which would allow the licences in the 1452 – 1492 MHz, 2350 - 2390 MHz and 3410 - 3600 MHz bands to be traded with a competition assessment, should it be required. The draft regulations would give effect to our proposed policy.

Ofcom’s earlier consultation on varying the Spectrum Access Licence for the 1452 -1492 MHz band - http://ofcom.cmail1.com/t/i-l-yhjldjy-ptjxkki-k/

Ofcom’s earlier consultation on the PSSR Award of the 2.3 GHz and 3.4 GHz bands - http://ofcom.cmail1.com/t/i-l-yhjldjy-ptjxkki-u/

This consultation closes on 8 May 2015.

Consultation details http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/mobile-trading-regs-apr-15/