Dark Radio

In selecting a new chairman, with Powell stepping down, there seems probable risk of relaxing FCC Sunshine rules, and reopening policy arguments for more property-like treatment of FCC licenses. The billions of dollars from licensing fees attract the political sharks with interests not representative of the consumer, the technology or the taxpayer.

The assumption of broadcast spectrum as private property grew from the early days of radio wherein the technology was so crude that interference was the rule under even the most favorable circumstances. Today’s technology renders the concept of interference and scarcity of spectrum obsolete. Economists, however, advise a free enterprise solution with competitive bidding as the only efficient way to allocate spectrum. If spectrum were a commodity that auction might make sense, but it is not.

The auctioning of spectrum proves a windfall to the general fund and to tax revenue; indeed, it is a hidden tax. The consumer pays the tax in the form of unconscionably high cost for communication.

More than a hidden taxes however the auction produces an artificial scarcity of spectrum where no such scarcity exists. It results in a windfall to the owners of spectrum and to the monopolies that bid up the price of spectrum to eliminate the new entry of competition. What is more to the advantage of the monopoly and the cartel is that the government engineers the scarcity for them. The early licensees paid less. New bidding does not create fairness, but creates further competitive advantage to the monopoly, again with the government doing it for them. Now the FCC wants to void the licenses and re-bid for the spectrum in order to re allocate spectrum. The Price paid creates another windfall for government revenue at consumer expense. Furthermore, it fosters a further unintended engineered scarcity, created by government, to the advantage of the incumbent conglomerates and cartels. Companies are more than happy to buy the engineered scarcity, which assures them of outrageous prices for broadcast and communications well into the future. No worry about Moor’s Law, anti-trust concerns or competition, the government has provided an endless scarcity, a monopoly for the conglomerate, at the expense of the public good.

EM or electro-magnetic emissions remain a mystery to most non-technical players. The lack of understanding of the nature of digital, quantum, photon and radio frequency underlies much of the problem. The decision makers do not understand E-M and thus treat it traditionally as property. The complexity itself eliminates effective consumer pressure.

Briefly, there is no difference between light, radio, and radiation except in the way they are perceived in the physical world. That difference leads to the assumption of physical differences. In a quantum sense they are all so tiny they cannot be measured. They have no measurable weight and all travel at the speed of light. Think of pulsing reciprocal fields of electrical and magnetic energy of varying frequency, thus of varying wavelength. The Ham thinks of them as radio waves, the physicist views them as photons. In the lower frequencies, they are identified by frequency while in the higher energy range they are referred to by wavelength. From very long wave, emissions that can travel around the world under water to the gamma ray that treats cancer they are alike. They are all transparent. None will ever occupy the same space. Furthermore, they all have the property of polarity and can be identified by their polarity as well as by their frequency.

Today’s digital, multi wave, adaptive radio and spread spectrum technologies take full advantage of the transparency of EM and can broadcast without interference across the whole spectrum, dodging crowded spots and propagating a cloud of E-M so finely dispersed as to be un-detectable beneath the floor of so called thermal noise. The government does it now for military communications, un-detected and un-decipherable without the receiver popping about to the same random frequency distribution upon which the digital bits were sent.

With the government’s commitment to the auction and the revenue it creates, the conglomerate’s commitment to engineered scarcity, and the politicians commitment to campaign contributions from the incumbent monopolies there seems no way that the broadcast spectrum will ever open up. There may be a solution offshore! I remember when I could get the wonderful clear channel radio past the telephone wires into my car in western Kansas; I could write Jesus, care of this station, Del Rio, Texas. The Illegal transmitter was in Mexico. Aside from a bit of a fundamentalist bias, we could hear baseball games prizefights and even Elvis where none of the other stations could reach.

Dark radio may be the answer. Off-shore away from pesky regulations and spectrum auction, spread spectrum in the code division multiple access format distributed by adaptive radio over the entire E-M spectrum undetected beneath the floor of thermal noise that the FCC disregards, true competition could commence. It is the only way it seems that competition can bring price down in the present political environment of greed. Illegal as hell but untouchable and undetectable by the pitifully obsolete detection devices of the FCC, this may be the way to go. Once more, a nascent example of this technology operates presently as Sirrus Radio and XM Radio. Time to buy property on offshore islands, it may be time for free communication as in free speech.