 Good morning, afternoon, Ebony from ITU Geneva and welcome to the first session or episode of the ITU satellite webinars. This one is dedicated to interference to satellite systems, but it's not the only one. So we'll continue then with the NGSO launch constellation, the 7th of October and with HTS, GSO and Mobility, the 11th of November. We are counting with distinguished experts and executives as speakers and very importantly an incredible audience of more than 900 participants registered and which are being connected now. So this in a way is proving the need for more and more information, knowledge and data and our commitment to provide it to the ITU membership. Bearing this in mind, we have designed these informative events in a format with presentations and also Q&A and discussions. Now let me introduce the director of the Radio Communication Bureau, Mr. Mario Manierwicz, who will formally open this event. Thank you very much Jorge and good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all our distinguished speakers as well as to all participants who are joining this ITUR webinar from around the world. It's really incredible to see how many have joined and you are all welcome to join this first of the series of ITU satellite webinars that is starting today. During these three episodes, you will be taken to the most relevant topics and discussions concerning the exciting field of space services and satellite communications of today and of the years to come. We are proud to count on distinguished experts and organizations supporting these webinars and anew as a valuable audience. As you are aware, the latest World Radio Communication Conference held in Egypt last year was very successful in taking important decisions that will shape the future of radio communication, including space services. A stable regulatory framework was put in place to allow the deployment of large non-GSO constellations not only in the well-known KU and KA bands but also in higher frequency bounds around 40 and 50 GHz. GSO satellite networks have also improved the regulatory procedures so that administrations are better positioned when coordinating, licensing or operating earth stations in motion with the objective to enable broadband connectivity to citizens on board ships, aircraft and land vehicles as well as to ensure their safety and security. Dear friends, I am pleased to announce that the 2020 edition of the Radio Regulation has been made available for download. This publication incorporates to the International Treaty that governs the use of spectrum and satellite orbits, the modifications made by the World Radio Communication Conference of 2019. The radio regulations enable the functioning of all radio communication services, including satellite services, and I strongly encourage you to download it and consult this fundamental legal framework. Looking ahead towards WRC23, we have initiated studies and the preparatory work that will allow us to benefit from the latest advances in satellite technologies. The agenda for the next conference will consider expanding satellite services to higher frequency bands, better using inter-satellite links or suborbital vehicles, accommodating new frequency allocations to space research, earth exploration and meteorological satellite services to monitor our planet. These few examples illustrate the need for more bandwidth, global harmonization and its consequent advantages of economies of scale. It is clear that space services that we increasingly rely upon can play a key role to achieve the UN's sustainable development goals. But to do so, these services need to be protected from harmful interference. This is why today's ITU satellite webinar will focus on the dissemination of information on measures to protect satellite systems from harmful interference. Dear all, I invite you to enjoy the webinar, participate actively in it, and more importantly, to apply the concepts that you will learn to enable the development of this fascinating field of space services and satellite communications. Have a nice webinar. Thank you, Director of the Radio Communication Bureau. Now we'll move on to the first episode, really in the discussions and the presentations we have dealing with the interference to satellite systems. For that purpose, we are counting with distinguished speakers from NASA, Glenn Feldeig, from European Space Agency, Elena Daganso, also from UtahSAT for the cases of GSO, to Etan Laban, and finally for Eurocontrol to get our birds. Before going into these details and while we are waiting for more people to connect and to benefit from this webinar, I will try to give you an introduction to this subject by providing you with some information we have in the bureau, which will be used to stimulate the discussions and the questions during this webinar. So, what we are going to see is a short snapshot of the current situation, the ITU initiative to tackle this problem of interference, an overview of the procedure to use in case of car for interference, and some conclusions. To summarize in one screenshot some facts related to the space services, we can say that there are more than 50 years of space regulations since the first administrative conference was held. Today there are 68 member states with access to space resources, meaning they have recorded satellite networks and operating. In total there is 1,700 satellite networks operating and recorded, a total of four terahertz globally of a spectrum coordinated and recorded, and because we need to know the health of the system, we are trying to measure the percentage of a spectrum which is free of car for interference. As you know, ITU has the main goal of ensuring the operation free of car for interference. So, based on the reports that we are receiving, we have measured that there is around 99.95% in the last four years, which is free of car for interference for the GSO. This seems to be a little bit optimistic. In fact, we know that there is a lack of reports in some cases, so that's the need of our message to try to get more information from you in the sense of measuring the actual situation. We can see that with the broken line in orange, in fact, the trend of the affected bandwidth to interference is increasing. At the same time, the percentage or the total capacity which is being recorded is also increasing. This makes a stable situation in terms of the ratio between the affected bandwidth and the total capacity. It's less than 0.1%. We can also see in this graph the distribution along the GSO. We have introduced for this purpose a tool called SIRS that we will mention later to also capture this information and analyze it. Now let's present to you typical cases which are reported to VR and then they will be addressed by the respective speakers later on. One of the first cases is the fixed satellite service, the broadcasting satellite service in the CKU and KA band. In those cases, the main reason or cause for interference was either the lack of coordination, unauthorized use, some unnecessary missions as defined in the number 15.1 of the regular regulation, which is typically high power and not modulated carrier and sometimes technical operation and things like transpolarization interference. What is the impact of this just trying to illustrate the importance is that, for example, if you are watching a football match, you may lose a goal. You don't know if it is a goal or not. You cannot see where they match. You may have impact in banking transactions. You can also have impact at the corporate or working from home levels as we are doing today. This is in terms of FSS and VSS. We have also received reports in terms of earth operations satellite service passive in 1400 to 1427 megahertz band for which the ghost was either unwanted emissions from radars or other radio devices operating in adjacent bands and exceeding levels containing the resolution 750. There were some other cases of non-authorized use of CCTV wireless devices making illegal use of this passive band and they are in contradiction, of course, of the number 5, 340 of the regular regulations. And there were also a few cases or more cases in some localized area about intermediate frequency radiation from VSS receivers due to poor shielding or cables and connectors. This will be expanded later on by the respective speakers. In this latter case, the impact can be either loss of data or collection of wrong information about our planet. Another system which is also very important and for which there were reports submitted to the ITU is the radio navigation satellite service or RMSS in the frequency bands of 1.5 gigahertz range and 1.2 gigahertz. In those cases, according to the information made available to DVR, the reason was either the use of transmitting devices without the required authorization or license for which the ITU is always encouraging the administration to do a national enforcement of those devices in order to avoid these cases of interference and also some cases of military exercises or operations near zones of conflict. What is the impact of these cases? Well, the impact can be quite significant from affecting airplanes or ships or even though any one of us who is using just an application in our personal mobiles or in autonomous vehicles. We have to remember that the radio regulation states in the provision number 1528 that the absolute international protection of transmissions uses for safety and regulatory of flights. These are the main topics that we will expand later on. We also have received reports on the mobile satellite services in the 1.6, 2 and 2.6 gigahertz and also concerning the radio astronomy services in the 1.6 gigahertz caused by the NONGSO satellite network. If you wish to expand on this subject, you can visit also the VR director's report to the past WRC 19 as it is stated on the bottom. Now, how is ITU tackling this interference problem? We have different fields of action. The first one is the prevention, which is through the ITU study groups, the radio assembly, the World Radio Conference, which the last one, as we said, was held in Egypt recently and was very successful. And once this radio regulation, which by the way, as the director said, was updated and published just yesterday, this radio race will be applied by both the VR and also the administrations, for example, the coordination and classification procedures. These are just measures for prevention. There are other measures for corrections, for example, the application of the Article 15 and in that case, if it cannot be resolved to the radio regulation board. In addition to that, we have deployed SEALS online application, which is to facilitate the reporting, the extension of information between administrations and provide assistance. I would like to invite you to visit this website for which the link is here and open an account if you haven't done so and use it. In addition to that, we are trying to expand more in terms of informative fora as the current one we are having now. The objective of this is to raise awareness of the impact of interference and the need for cooperation. In addition to this, informative fora, different solutions are also presented and discussed. Also we have expanded in terms of international monitoring systems. Today we are having also cooperation agreements with eight countries. These are, if I remember well, Germany, Pakistan, Belarus, China, Korea, Oman and some with Brazil. In addition and finally for this slideshow, we have also to mention that the ITUR sector is providing very useful recommendations, reports and campbooks. So if you are dealing with one interference, how to do this? How is the process? In principle, the telecom operators will detect this interference, this kind of interference and will try to inform the satellite operator and they will communicate each other to resolve it. And this is mainly the 90% of the cases. But when this cannot be resolved, it is when it is escalated to the administration. So administration A is communicating with administration B. And this is also many cases to resolve. In case that this cannot be achieved, it is when it is arriving to ITU. And for this, we have the Constitution, Article 15 and 13.2 to provide assistance. So in this case, ITU is acting between both administrations. And normally most of the cases are dealt in this orange box. In case this cannot be solved, there is also some other legal instrument in terms of compulsory arbitration and settling of disputes. But fortunately it was never applied as far as I know. So this is in brief terms what is the procedure look like. And to finalize for this introduction, let me say that, remember that our main objective in ITU is to ensure operation free of government interference and why? Because of course you want to have a successful mission, you want to give a good quality of service to the citizenship and for the companies to ensure also the return of investment. The spectrum free of government interference is stable, as we have seen. But due to the more and more emerging system that we are expecting, there is a higher risk of interference. The RFI dynamics certainly is getting more complex. That's why we need that to report these cases of interference. So it will allow us to assess the actual situation. And as we have seen and will see during the course of today, there are different services affected and there are different reasons or causes which are provoking or impacting. However, there is a common solution approach which applies to all of them to keep them at a minimum level of interference. And these are the regulation, the technology, and very importantly the cooperation among administration and stakeholders. Having said that, I will not take any more time and I would like just to come back to the panel to go to the first of those subjects. And for this, I am pleased to give the floor to Glenn Feldig, who is International Spectrum Program Manager at NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio, U.S. Glenn is also responsible for the coordination notification of satellite networks from NASA and has been the U.S. delegation for the last six years. Has also participated at the ITUR Working Party study groups for the past 24 years. And he's currently the chairman of the ITUR Working Party 3M and head of the U.S. delegation to the ITUR study group 7. Glenn, if you are ready, you can take the floor and we look forward to the presentation. Okay, good morning or good day to everybody. I know we have a lot of time zones represented. Let me share my screen. We tried this before. Okay, good. So good day, everybody. Yeah, there's really a few things I'd like to discuss. NASA certainly has a number of interests in space, obviously, and communication in space. And we do obviously have requirements for, we might consider more traditional applications of communication in space. But we do have within the space sciences, not just NASA, but many space agencies, some kind of special considerations that I wanted to touch on, because I think some of the more traditional applications of communication are going to be touched on by other panelists, specifically working in deep space and what that means. Some passive remote sensing and how passive remote sensing works, though I believe my colleague Elena is going to go into this in a lot more detail than I would. And finally, the very exciting area of communication at the moon. And each one is a little bit unique because the location of where we're operating is a little different, some of the mission requirements and the ways in which we're sensitive to potential radio frequency interference are just a little different in how we measure it, how we monitor it from the more traditional, just straight, near-Earth communication type applications. When we talk about deep space communication, the definition of what's deep space is actually two million kilometers from Earth. That's in the radio regulations. You're not in deep space till you're two million kilometers from the Earth. And just to put that in perspective, if you're at the moon, you're nowhere near deep space. Actually, communication with the moon is still going to be in the near-Earth bands, but obviously the distances are so great that the receivers have to be extremely sensitive. And we'll be talking a little bit about the moon a little later. Also, it takes quite a while to get to deep space. And there's a number of phases before our deep space missions even get there. Obviously, we start off on Earth and then there's the launch and the early orbit. Typically, our deep space missions are going to do a few laps around the Earth, do a few orbits while we do some initial checkouts and look at things. We may do some slingshots, do some essentially elliptical orbits to try to build up speed, use the Earth's gravity to slingshot us off into space for which there's a cruise phase. We, you know, a number of missions of recently, I believe, the U.S., the UAE, I believe China, have all in the last few months launched things to Mars. Launching to Mars is always tricky because you want to do it when Mars is going to be relatively near the Earth since we're in completely different orbits. And we only get that shot about once every two and a half years. So if you miss the window, you have to wait two and a half years to do it again, so there's been a lot of discussion in the news about missions going to Mars. They all kind of go off at the same time. We have near-Earth flybys, again, when we're trying to build up speed. This is also when we do a lot of course corrections, early mission checkouts. A lot of those are critical ops. And even missions that go off to deep space and return to the Earth, the picture you see on the right there is a mission we had called Stardust that went off, it flew through the tail of a comet, picked up particles from the tail of the comet and then returned them back to the Earth. So even things that we send off to deep space can come back. In fact, one of the mission, Perseverance, ITU filing named Mars 2020, because we didn't know it was going to be called Perseverance when we flew it, when we filed it, I mean, is on its way to Mars. It'll be there in a couple of years. And it's going to be bottling up interesting rock and soil samples that a future mission can go to Mars and then return back to the Earth. And what I like to bring up about this is we think about protecting missions that are going to deep space from radio interference. And it's very easy to say, well, yeah, if it's things on Mars or even further out, you know, it's easy to protect them because they're so far away, but there are a lot of considerations of, well, they're allowed to operate in deep space bands and they're protected while still near the Earth. This is a Article 4.24 of the radio rigs. Even though they're not 2 million kilometers away from Earth yet, they're going to be the purpose of their mission is to send them out there. But they are still subject to potential interference while they're still close to the Earth. The next one I like to talk about is passive remote sensing. This is something that causes some confusion sometimes because essentially, you know, everything on the planet, every physical body emits electromagnetic radiation and our passive sensors detect that. And depending on what the object is made out of or the temperature of it, it determines what the frequency is going to be. So these are things that we can't just, if we get an interference, we can't just switch to another channel. There is a, it's mother nature that's determining what the frequency is that these things are going to emit at. And when you're talking about the emissions, these are emissions by molecules. The signals are really, really weak. So we're kind of locked in when we're trying to do this, these monitorings of it could be temperature, it could be moisture, it could be chemistry that we just can't move around. And emissions into some of these bands are can be can be difficult for us. It's actually it's great when we get no harmful interference, obviously. And it's almost better for some in some respects. If we get so much interference that it just blows us off the air, because then we know the data is bad, the problem comes with remote sensing. When we have just a little bit of interference creep in, because when that happens, we know we get a signal or we make a measurement, we go, well, it seems plausible, it could be a real measurement. And then we take this data and that's what goes into the the models of things like climate change, we NASA doesn't do weather forecast thing, but the data does go to the weather forecasters. And when it's hurricane season, you know, we had Hurricane Sally land just yesterday and in the United States causing damage. But it could happen anywhere. If we get data that's just a little bit off, because there's a little bit of interference, but it's not enough that we can actually detect that it's not just a real signal. This is bad data that goes into the weather forecasting models. And when we're trying to figure out where is the typhoon going to land or which way is the hurricane going to blow before it makes landfall and where are we going to have to send aid and relief and supplies? You know, bad data just is not good to put into the models. I often say, you know, these these radiometers are essentially like if you think of a radio astronomy to telescope, just take one of those, make the antenna smaller, stick it in space and point it down. It's just a power meter. There's it's it's not like if you have interference into a communication channel, all your ones and zeros get garbled and the data coming out the other end of the link makes no sense. It's just a pure measurement of how much power do we see in a particular channel? And then the last item that I wanted to talk about was actually about the moon. The moon is is is a unique challenge. NASA has committed itself that it's going to send the the first woman and the next man back to the moon here in just a couple of years. We already have some satellites orbiting the moon, but we're going to the moon to stay and it's not just NASA. There's lots of missions going to the moon. And it's an interesting thing when you think about like within on Earth, the development of wireless infrastructure and how we develop how we've developed from, you know, wireless telegraphs up to, you know, IMT and aeronautical and everything else took took a good deal of time, took time to build the infrastructure, took a lot of years. We had a chance to kind of figure it out, but the moon is about to get very busy. It's not just NASA going to the moon. The European Space Agency is going to the moon. China is at the moon. There are commercial interests in going to the moon. And so we really need to coordinate our lunar activities. This is going to be very, very important for for the future, because if we're not all working together, it could be a mess up there. Within the space agencies, we already have a very good cooperative effort going on, but, you know, there are going to be commercial interests going there. There's going to be just there's going to be terrestrial. I can't even say terrestrial because terra means they're going to be point to point links on the surface of the moon, mobile links on the moon, links from the moon to the Earth, links from the moon to things orbiting the moon, different operators. There's there's going to be people on the moon. So it becomes a very, very complex issue that we're going to have to really get a grip on quickly. The space agencies are doing this certainly amongst themselves. And we're trying to communicate with other non civil space agencies that have expressed interest in doing work on the moon. Could be commercial tourism, could be mining. There's folks that are talking about doing some mining on the moon. So it's just about it's going to get very busy up there very quickly over just a few years. And so that that's that's a challenge that we're really looking at and to make sure that we don't have interference. So with that, I think those are just from NASA's perspective. Some of the some of the interesting challenges that we were having to deal with right now. And I think that concludes my presentation. Thank you, Glenn. It was very interesting presentation. I'm very excited to know about the the current issues, which maybe addresses about the moon as well. We have five more minutes for questions in case we haven't received yet many questions, only a few. But please don't be shy. If everybody would like to ask some questions to Glenn. I have one here. In fact, we have received and it's about. Yes, exactly. You were speaking about the moon also and what is your view on possible future locations to space services around the moon? Interim get a little choppy audio. The question is about allocations for around the moon. Yes, I understand that. Well, today, as you know, well, in the U.S. we have three regions, one, two and three with frequency allocations, and there are some. Missions that they are going to the moon or and there there were discussions, I think, also about if the allocation would be the same than in the in the around the earth, or there will be a need of a region for, let's say, or how how would you see this? It's perhaps early to say, but there are some people who are already thinking, and I think the question is addressing to that direction. Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. And it's it's it's one we've had to discuss before. It's something we've definitely had to take into account. The from an OK, from a NASA perspective, we're not seeing too many issues with respect to the the table of allocations right now. The the one somewhat difficult point is that we have. As I said, the moon is still near earth. It's not in deep space. So we would be we, NASA would be using space research allocations that exist to support the moon. However, the moon is so far away that we probably would be using those allocations from mostly our deep space network. There are there are you really need a big antenna to reach the moon for regular operational work. Now, when we start getting into the things like space tourism or mining in space, that that is going to lead to operators in the space research bands who haven't been there before. And so that we have to see how congested that spectrum is going to get. And that could lead to us, you know, needing to look at new allocations, perhaps only in the region of the moon. I've heard some talk in the past. People have brought up, should we make the moon a region for? But I'm not so sure personally that that's necessary. I think that could get real complicated real quickly. Now, for things like point to point links on the moon, there have been some people talking about, you know, would we just call that could we use like IMT bands on the moon and just deploy like a cellular network on the moon? Technologically, yes. But we have to remember that the way the radio regs are set up, you know, the radio regs were set up when, you know, what is it, 110 years ago now, everything was terrestrial. There was never a thought about being in space. And so the radio regs in article one say very clearly, everything in the radio regs is terrestrial unless it specifically says space or satellite in it. It default to being in space. So we would need to look at if we were to do something like deploying a cellular network or using you know, traditional fixed and mobile technologies on the moon. If we'd have to, because those technologies are defined as being on Earth, once they're on the moon, they're not on Earth. So we got an issue of definitions that we would need to try to work through. Thank you. Yes, it seems that it's not something easy to resolve today. Let's say it has to go through a full process. I understand. I think this your answer is already covering some of the questions. I have one more very specific. I mean, there are questions about jurisdiction, about questions about if NASA would take the deal, let the lead, sorry, in building a new legislation regarding the frequency coordination on the moon. And one particular about what is NASA concerned of interference from 95 gigahertz to 250 gigahertz. Is there a specific frequency of your concern? I don't know if you can answer now. It's very specific question. Perhaps it's better to or you have it in mind. Well, 95 to 250 gigahertz. Yes, exactly. Yeah, most of what we have up there is going to be the passive remote sensing. And we it's something. You know, there's an agenda item that's coming up. I want to say it's specifically looking at the two thirty one to two fifty two gigahertz. When you know, when when the frequencies up there were allocated years ago, there weren't a lot of known requirements. The table does go up that high. And so we are looking at a couple of ways of, OK, now we are we NASA and the other space agencies are up there doing passive remote sensing. And quite honestly, we're doing some of it in bands where it's not allocated, but we're passive. Nobody's going to get radio interference from us and nobody else is up there so to interfere with us. So it's been sort of OK. But we see, you know, as the demand for spectrum keeps going, people keep moving to higher frequencies that we need to perhaps relook at how the allocations are made, relook now that we have emissions and we have real mission requirements up there to make sure that everyone is is properly accommodated because I think, you know, years ago when the table of allocations went up to two hundred and seven was extended all the way up to two hundred and seventy five gigahertz, there was a lot of guessing going on there. So maybe taking a new look at it before the, you know, before things get too crowded to actually figure out, you know, relook at what are the requirements up there. OK, thank you. I think for the time being, it's OK if you can stay a bit more. We will have a set of more questions at the end with all the panelists, but we should perhaps move to the next panelist. Thank you very much, Glenn, and we'll come back to you at the end. So now we are pleased to have also Elena Dagan, also Sevio from the European Space Agency. Elena is a senior frequency management engineer working for the European Space Agency in their facilities in the Netherlands. Her task within the air observation directorate includes the participation in the WRC preparatory process to ensure the protection of ISA air observations interest in the utilization of the spectrum. Elena has been deeply involved in increasing awareness of the RFI problem for passive sensors, in particular, the ISA Smalls Mission. Leland, if you are ready, Floris yours. So good day to everybody. I'm Elena Dagan, from the European Space Agency. Thank you very much, Jorge. And thank you also for the opportunity of spending presenting here in this forum, what is the problematic of the interference to passive remote sensors. Remote sensing is one of the few, few systems that unservices that they don't interfere to anybody, but they're seemingly sensitive. And that is the reason why it's so special. So this is what I am going to cover in this presentation, is explaining what is the importance of the passive sensors, what is the band that I use, that as Glenn has explained before, that this is defined by the Mother Nature, we cannot change those bands, and which are the key ITU recommendations that are related to this. Then when we come to interference, which are the actions that can be taken? And it's important to have an idea of how big is the problem. And to that fact, one of the tools that we have is to see how many RFIs have been reported, for how many missions and how many bands. We have then the myth of the RFI mitigation, sort of we can listen that this where more and more advertisement of what is passive sensors and RFI detection and mitigation. OK, mitigation can be helpful, but it's not a panacea, it's not idea, it's not gratis. They have some associated disadvantages. So we need to avoid the wrong messages and we will see that also. And then we have a for ISSA, one of the, our speeders in RFI has been extensively developed in Elban with this most radiometer. This is a mission that was launched in 2009 and that observed a high number of interference that were not expected. There is a lot of work that has been done since then. And I will present an overview of what is the situation and how we learn with that. And we will finish with just some conclusions. So the earth exploration and also the meteorological satellite systems, they use active and passive sensors. And what they use this sensor is essentially to study the earth and the natural phenomena that are associated. What is unique in the satellites that are used for earth observation is the capability to do global measurements over there. It's not just a country, it's not just an area, it's global measurements over the earth, land, ocean and atmosphere, but also have the capability with the satellites to focus, to target an area that has been, for example, just damaged with, so we say that what is unique is global observation, the capability to target areas that maybe they have at this natural disaster and we want to focus the observation there and also the possibility to do monitoring of observation over long periods of time. What is important is to stress that it's key to have the access to the radio spectrum. And that is not only for space-based sensors, also for ground sensors and passive and active. This is important for all the activities for studies of the global warming and climate change, but also there are many, many applications that now we are taking for granted, data is there, we are used to it, like that is the weather forecast and the prediction of the weather, the support to natural disasters, but we cannot take for granted because we don't have the spectrum that cannot be done. And finally, to mention that the exploration as a whole, these benefit to society, not only for the non-profit and space agencies, but also for the commercial sectors. Which are the bands that are used? Which are the frequencies? The products, data products we have from the remote sensors, what they are observing is the atmosphere and for that the bands to be observed, they are fixed. This cannot be duplicated. Each frequency band is good, is used for certain observations. And at the same time, in most cases, we need to use different bands to do the observation of certain parameters. That means that we need to measure the same in different frequency bands. That is like for, to resolve parameters like sea surface, temperature, surface winds, soil, moisture, rain, snow. But essentially what we have here is the chart with the frequencies and the absorption in the atmosphere. So we can see the peaks of the oxygen and the water vapor. And depending on what parameter is going to be observed, there are different bands that are used. The passive sensor require very sensitive, very low noise receiver because they are essentially measured noise. And the emissions are about certain, very low level, maybe a harmful interference. And the big difficulty is not only if it is a big interference, it's also that if it is very small. In many cases, the difficulty is to make the difference, to differentiate the one to signal from the interference. Here we have some of the ITU recommendations that can be, that are very useful related with the passive remote sensing. And we have the performance and interference criteria, the identification of which bands are useful, technical characteristics and operational characteristics of the sensors. This is the characteristics used for the certain incompatibility analysis in the WRC process. And also in the report 2165, there is some analysis about the different mitigation techniques. Let's see about the frequency bands that we can use. We're going to make here two main groups. One is what is the purely passive bands. These are bands that with an ITU footnote 5,340, no emissions are allowed in the band. All man-made emissions are prohibited. And for this purpose, in Resolution 750, you set the restriction to the unwanted emissions of the adjacent bands, because essentially that is impossible to avoid. You have active services in the adjacent band were going to have unwanted emissions. So there are some restrictions to the level of the unwanted emissions in the Resolution 750, very important for passive sensing. And in Europe, there are in some bands that Europe at a regional level has taken the step forward to make mandatory the levels, the rescission of the levels of unwanted emissions that in the Resolution 750 in some cases are only recommended. Of the bands that we have is worth to mention the L-Ban 1.4 GHz that is used by SMOS, ESA Mission, SMAP, and Aquarius, NASA. And that both, all these missions they have experienced, they have detected a lot of interference. And with SMOS, ESA has gained a lot of experience about the process of location of the RFI, characterization and defying the sources and interfacing with the national regulatory authorities. To ensure that there are some investigations and that we are improving the situation. Then also in 10 GHz, that there is a band that is very important, we don't have in ESA any mission at this moment, but we'll come soon with the SEMAR mission that is a new competitive mission. And in this band, there are multiple RFI cases that have been reported and that you can see in different publications. Here is your size snapshot what is the resolution 750 that I just mentioned. So here we have, there are two tables in the resolution, table one and two. Table one, they establish what is the limits for the unwanted emission limits, that are mandatory limits. In this specific snapshot, I have selected for the L-Ban 1.4 GHz and also in the 24 GHz. And we can see here the mandatory limits that are imposed for IMT and also for inter-satellite links. And this is the unwanted emissions of these active services into the passive band. And then the other part in the right, the table two, these are, unfortunately, they are only recommended, even though for many administrations recommended levels in the resolution 750, they are implemented as mandatory. What we have here now is the other family of passive bands but these are bands that are not purely passive. That means that the emissions are not prohibited in the band but they are shared with other services. These bands are typically shared with terrestrial fixed and mobile service and also with down links of Leo and Gio FSS links. And to this purpose, the ITU regulation have set the condition for sharing the band. And in case that there is harmful interference, we had the possibility, the same that we had in the previous case for the purely passive or reporting interference. Interference protection for all the bands is in the recommendation at age 2017. The characterization of the RF5s is always important, the same that is the characterization of the sensor. And when ESS passive can claim protection because it's operating in the band and has all the characteristics that are okay for that. In that case, the next step is to move to the reporting of the harmful interference. Typically, the big problem that we normally have is sometimes not so much the in band but the adjacent bands. And when we are talking about radar system in adjacent bands, the problem of the excessive unwanted emissions is something that for passive sensors is a quite common problem. Looking to the left, we see here few bands that are worth to mention. In the 10 gigahertz, there are multiple cases of RF5s reported, something similar for the 18 gigahertz and identical for the 36, 37 gigahertz. In this case, for example, ESSA has identified for the Sentinel-3 radiometer a massive interference due to almost blinding the instrument due to radar emissions. So it's something that is very, very difficult to handle in many cases because the truth is that the passive sensors are extremely sensitive. So which actions can be taken? We can take preventive actions that is what we have in the radioregulations that is we have recommendation reports, we have resolution, we have restrictions of the unwanted emissions, we have prohibited the emissions in the band that is the prevention. But when there is the prevention, it's not working. We have to go to the corrective part that is the capability to report the harmful interference to the administrations and what we do typically, especially in the last years with the experience that ESSA has got with ESMOS, we are also keeping the Bureau of ITU for information that is also useful to have some sort of statistics about what is the situation. We have the article 15 on the appendix 10 that is covered in the part of harmful interference and the type of support and the type of regulatory framework in the radioregulations that have been introduced by Jorge before. And also we have an online system in ITU that facilitate the process to report this device. In the case of the passive sensors, it's very different to the case of interference between two radiolinks, for example, of two satellites that they have broadcasting systems. In this case, what we could see is that the information that appendix 10 was asking to provide to the operator of the potentially interfering service, that set of information was not tailored for the passive sensors. Because of that, within the study group 7, in group 7C, was developed this recommendation that we have here, the RIS 2106, that is given essentially what is the template and what is the approach to follow in the detection and in the resolution of the RIS 5 for passive sensors. It's given us what is the template that need to be provided to the administration so that we facilitate the investigation of what is the source of the RIS 5. This table, I find that is quite interesting because essentially what we see here is the different, for the different bands, purely passive, or when you share what can we do depending on type of interference we are having. I am going to pass quickly because time is going fast. The sizing of the RIS 5 problem is important and it's important for RIS 5 passive sensors because there is an increasing market demand of mass market devices that they have more and more special needs. And there is also a push for the regulation of the commercial market with unlicensed devices. And in that situation, the sensors, they are receiving the aggregate impact of a high, high number of small interference. In that situation, it's extremely difficult to get any changes, to have any fix, any easy fix, because that has a lot of implications. And that is why it's so important to set since the very beginning, which are the regulatory environment for the use of that specific band. We see in passive sensing an important increase of the RFIs and unfortunately it's not so easy to know about all the bands, what is going on. And that one of the reasons is that only recently we have in ATU this SIRS system that is similarly useful because it's a way to record internationally the RFIs and that has a way also to increase the awareness of what is the RFI problem. Another issue is that typically, not all the operators of passive sensors are regularly reporting the RFI events. And that is unfortunately something that hopefully will change when it's perceived that this is doable and you can get a benefit. And finally to mention that there is not enough awareness about the procedures that some agencies or operators need to follow in case of RFIs to sensors. If with the mitigation of the RFIs, we need to avoid wrong messages mainly because there is always some quality degradation of the data. And that is in many cases, not specified in the papers, in the scientific papers that we can see. And it's extremely important for the RFI combat, let's say, what is the detection and the characterization of the RFIs when it's something that is punctual, that is very well located RFI, in that case, it's easy to locate and to take actions for the elimination. But if it is an aggregating interference of the abic area, that is more difficult. And as I said before, when it's a mass market equipped in that case, it's extremely difficult. What is even more problematic for passive sensors is those RFIs that are so close to the noise floor that become almost unnoticeable till the number is so big that they need to late. I will just to show you some slides about what we have seen with the radiometer of a smalls in 1.4 kilohertz. This is what was the RFI probability map in 2010, that is 10 years ago when the satellite was launched. You can see here that the areas are in red. There are areas that in all the passes could be detected interference. And that was January. Mainly the RFIs are concentrated in Europe Middle East and South and East Asia. Here is very interesting because what's having done is to do the probability of RFIs but during the whole period for 2010 to 2019. And you can see here all those areas that in that moment or another, they are experiencing RFI. So that means that certainly in these areas there is no possibility to do a long term monitoring of the parameters that a smalls is observing. Strong global statistics, we have like 500, almost 500 RFIs and we have very strong RFIs that is like 60 worldwide. And but a small RFIs below 1,000 Kelvin we have like close to 275 worldwide. In Asia, they are concentrated at the highest number of interference and the strongest are Asia and Middle East with some of them also in Europe. A reporting process. We have reported to all the ISA member states, some European countries that are not ISA members and outside Europe, all together fit two countries. RFIs, what is interference that have been detected? CCTV cameras and authorized radio link, TV repeaters, deck, mobile phones and also IF circuits of 12 gigahertz receiving satellite signals. And all of these are in bands in a band that only mission are prohibited. And then for the out of band, the main RFI source detected have been raiders. Here you can see over the time, what is the evolution? You can see for example, the strong RFIs that they are from going down with all the reporting efforts, but certainly that there are a lot of areas still that they have interference. This is an example about the amount of data that has to be discarded. The percentage of data has to be just put aside because it's polluted. And that in this case, this is the case of interference over the area of Japan due to the radiation of the receiving equipment of the broadcasting system in KU-1, but the radiation is happening in the intermediate frequency, that is in 1.4. We're going to go to the conclusions and is that for the ISS passive sensors, the solution of the problem is mainly the prevention. Oh, sorry. The solution is the prevention because that is the important of having the relevant limits. It's very important the protection of the passive bands. The case of the illegal emissions that can be something that can be handled because with the cooperation of international authorities is something that can be reported and improved. However, for the case of excessive unwanted emission, that is something that is being more complicated and it's especially also difficult when it's identified due to aggregate of many, many artifacts. And we need to continue the efforts working together the scientific community and also ITU and the administrations. And with this, thank you very much. I'm sorry for being a bit longer than expected, but this is my presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Lina. It was a bit longer, but certainly the information you provided in particular technical information is very useful. And just to move forward to the next speaker before that perhaps just one or two questions we have received. And then again, we will catch up at the end of the... I'm sorry. My microphone, did you hear? Yeah. Now I was saying thanks for the presentation which was indeed very fruitful and with a lot of technical substance. Just before to move forward to the next speaker perhaps as we did before one or two questions and then we will catch up with more questions at the panel. Once from the VR we cannot avoid because you really have done a lot of efforts for reporting. I think ESA is one of our main contributors to the series in terms of reports. So we would like to know your experience in terms of the use of your systems and if you see that there would be one possibility for improvements also. Thank you Jorge. I think that the series is a very good tool and it's very good because it's useful to keep the stability, not only of the reports also of the evolution of the different reports. And I think that for the case of the sensors it would be quite useful to have a sort of summary of what is the bands and the reporting that has been done because so far at least for ESA we are keeping not public the reports that we have but that is something that can be changed. But I believe that since we are with CIRS I can tell you that we have also noticed an improvement in the responses from the administrations. There's more visibility and really from ESA we are really very thankful for this initiative. Okay, well thank you for your feedback and more importantly for using it. And we have a couple of improvements to do still and we have passed it to our software developers now and we are free from the WRC-19 implementation that will improve it even more. But we hope that more and more administrations are using it as well. One more question perhaps we will take it later in order not to be more delayed. Yes, during the panel and thanks again for the presentation and we would like to move now from the LIO orbit that we were mainly with the ESA service to a GSO orbit. In this case, Etan Laban from Director of Orbital Resources at UTELSAT will give us some words or some messages. Etan is working at UTELSAT since 2010 and prior to joining UTELSAT, Etan was responsible for the regulatory policy and management of service and spectrum licenses at the global level for Immersant Global, the UK-based mobile satellite services operator for which he joined in 2002. From 1989 to 2001 he held various responsibilities at Alcatel Space Industries including regulatory standards coordination for the Skybridge Broadband Satellite Program. Etan? Yes, thank you for introducing me and it's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to talk to you also obviously about interference. I have a feeling that I'm coming down first from deep space then down to the moon then to the planet Earth as a whole and now maybe into your living rooms and offices but I'm going to talk about interference in a more practical standpoint for services provided by the GSO satellite systems for which UTELSAT has been invited and I'm very pleased to give you our perspective. So thank you all again. Just to begin, I'd like to say that probably useful to look at the categories of interference that a GSO operator will experience. We have most of the interference that we receive is simply errors. It's simply errors in planning of emissions. It could be technical errors in setting up links or equipment could be faulty. We also have, so that's really the majority. There's also adjacent satellite interference which can fall into some of those categories from other satellite operators and that involves of course, discussing amongst ourselves and our coordination agreements. There are going to be interference from services which are using shared bands or in adjacent bands. I'll speak about that a little bit later as well. But what I'll probably focus on, it's always a favorite subject in this 10 or 15 minutes that I have would be what we often call intentional interference. Now it's low incidence, fortunately, for satellite operators, but it is the most difficult to approach and to solve and it has the highest consequences as you'll see. Just as an aside, there's another kind of interference if you would call it that. It's called pirate consumptions. I'll put that in a separate category, although it's intentional. It's usually, I would say somewhat of a commercial issue where as an operator or a group is trying to use, illicitly use satellite capacity to convey their material, their messages or their information, but they normally try to coexist with the existing services. In fact, not to try, they try not to cause harmful interference to real services because their objective is to stay online as possible. But I just wanted to mention that. So what do we do as a GSO operator on a day to day basis? What are our tools, what are our mechanisms? Well, many of you may know already, there's a co-operations for the types of interference which is between operators, it's called the satellite. There's an organization called the Satellite Data Association it exchanges information, shares information, which is key to being able to quickly resolve amongst operators the most common causes of interference which is non-intentional and accidental. There's also training which goes on and we support that, the Global Visa Forum has a large widespread training program for satellite operators, satellite people who are interested and need to set up satellite equipment. And that goes towards eliminating another very large source of unintentional interference which is a simple error. And all of this of course, anytime there is interference which doesn't get immediately resolved by the first phone call, we have a more operator to operator discussions. We will have administration discussions in some cases if it's depending on the nature of the service that we're observing. And we will, in parallel, and I'll talk about also that in a couple of minutes we have the basic technical responses and mitigation to deal with interference which we use. So just, we saw some diagrams, very useful diagrams from Jorge and I thank him because he gave a lot of the background for some of the scenarios so I don't have to repeat them again as how satellite works and how interference works. But I think it's still useful to highlight the very big difference between interference in the downlink and interference on the uplink. So obviously a satellite, and typically you provide information from the ground up to the satellite and it's either reflected or processed and it comes down and different, sometimes different beam coverages to the receiving terminals on the ground. Now, if you have interference on the downlink, it's localized interference and it's basically terrestrial in a way, terrestrial through transfer interference between the terrestrial interferer and the receiving earth station if it's in the case of intentional interference, of course, you can have downlink interference in the degeneration satellite under any conditions, I should be clear about that. But it doesn't, so it only affects locally. Uplink interference on the other hand, the uplink which is going up to the satellite is itself degraded. And so the satellite cannot provide information or services to any of the stations in the entire downlink beam. So it's much more serious. It's also the type of interference of the two which is by definition across border and nature. And so it more directly, it's also the interference which more directly implicates the IQ process. So probably talking more about that and when we get to the specifics in just a second. And before I go on to speak a little bit more on the specific problem which I mentioned on intentional, just a quick word on interference to sharing of frequencies with other services. A lot of people have spoken about that. It's clearly an important subject. There's many new services being introduced. I will say, excuse me, I will say that satellite FSS geostation operators have been dealing with sharing and the need to take care of possible interference from terrestrial services, such as especially fixed services for years. Oftentimes it's just a pragmatic approach. You can change frequencies of one or the other service. You can sometimes even just move an antenna to the other side of the building if it's a satellite receiving antenna or otherwise. But we also have to look at the new services and we're speaking a lot about the sharing studies, the introduction identifying a lot of new terrestrial services and INT which the sharing conditions, the co-existing conditions are being deeply studied. And that is such a vast subject and it's of course extremely important to us but I didn't think that it was a part of this. I wouldn't intend to make that part of this presentation. I think those of you who are in the WRC process, you know what this is about and I will see if that's for another seminar. So intentional interference, a few definitions just to be clear what we're talking about is again, very different from accidental or unintentional or consequential interference, consequential to just the operations which another service is trying to do in a normal way. We can characterize it and this has been discussed for many different symposia. So we can make a few conclusions. It's often of a high power, very often an unmodulated signal or a signal with no ID or no information whether it is modulated or not. A lot of times we'll see that it's highly directed towards a specific target, a specific target being a satellite receiver for the uplink which makes it unlikely that it's by accident. It often targets specific contents and program in the case of trying to stop certain fronts of the information which is objectionable to some parties from being widely distributed and so it's also time, certain times of the day. And probably the most telling of all is that a lot of times you'll see when we're dealing with unintentional, I mean, sorry, intentional interference is that it will track the mitigation efforts that the operator is trying to put into place. So if we switch channels, they switch channels, the interfering signal switches channels, frequencies, if we increase power, they might increase power also and so on and so on. So another thing we talk about cooperation about the working with the ITU, it's not a given that the player involved, and this is probably an understatement I should say, in generating unintentional interference is going to cooperate. They might not even be possible to find to engage in dialogue. So of course, this is the ITU and we know that in the regulations, administrations are those technically responsible for transmissions which are admitting from their territories and hence responsible in a way for the interference that they cause. But even with the best of will of the administrations, the actual situation on the ground doesn't make it so obvious in practice as we can all imagine. So what do we do when we have a case of such a problematic intentional interference? The first thing is we have to identify where the interference is coming from. And we've had entire seminars and technical developments are ongoing on geolocalization. It's using adjacent satellites, it's using your own satellite, it's using equipment on board a satellite, reference ground stations, there's many different techniques where you can pinpoint to a fairly close, well, I shouldn't say pinpoint, you can identify to a very close approximation as to where the emitting station is located. And that allows you to reach out to administrations to see if there is, what can be done, what's possible, the cooperation between them. Again, I mentioned that we adapt, we adapt our own transmissions in the meantime with the customers who are affected or the users who are affected in terms of power, we can increase the power and decrease the sensitivity of the satellite to a certain point, change channels and so on. But if we don't find a solution despite the best will between operators and administrations, then we do engage the ITU process, which of course always relies on good will and the good intentions to respect the treaty. Now, Jorge mentioned some of the, in the scheme of actions in the case of harmful interference, the two top bullets or bubbles in his graph, this enforcement, the diplomatic channels, multilateral treaties, compulsory arbitration, it never happens, we know that, that's not the solution, and that's not the way it works in this process. But we do have the good will and the good intentions for everyone to respect the treaty which works. We have the database which is available, as Elena has just mentioned in the CIRS where many of each interference report which is eligible to be put up for public information if the reporter so desires. And then there's the RAB to try and foster even more solutions between the players. So what we found in adapting and implementing that process is that what really works is raising awareness. A lot of times people, it could be as simple as the parties, whoever they might be, the hustle parties don't realize that they're easy to be spotted. That helps right away when that's no wonder the case. There's a lot of stakeholders which are honestly engaged and committed to cooperating to find solutions and to stop this from happening. The other thing is that we found that in line with what we were saying about geolocation and so on in cooperation amongst administrations for certified facilities. And this is under the, you mentioned that as well, there's now eight administrations with centers across all of the regions of the world that give global ability to have sort of an ITU supervised geolocation within the satellite memorandum of cooperation. That's very important to give credibility for the data which is being used as a basis of initiating dialogue. In the European countries, we had also an MOU that was more within the CPT for financially supporting our station which is the accredited station in Lihama in Germany. So that's a very successful and high standard site for this kind of geolocation. Again, geolocation is being improved every day with the techniques and it's even being put on board satellites so that they can actually increase even further the accuracy and the detail of the information. Again, I can't say over and over again. I know it sounds like I'm not repeating, but in the end, we're always still relying on the goodwill of the administrations as part of being part of the ITU, our membership and wanting to stay so and everyone in that sense, governments, operators, we all had a common goal to keep the telecommunications going and to respect the treaty. So just to conclude my brief, well, brief introduction, looking a bit at the history and the future at the same time, operators and as I've been evidenced by numerous symposium that we had over the past 10 years, we have experienced incidences. We have resolved incidents. We have seen waves of intentional interference happening in the past and we will probably see so and we need to be prepared for that in the present and future. But there is no one single answer. There's no one solution. What we need is a common understanding of the issues and a sharing of the known paths to the solution and in this way, we can continue to succeed. I think that last time we really spoke about this at a Planet Potentiary Conference in 2014 where the database and the Syracist system has its genesis. Maybe within view of the progress and in view of what we know now, maybe it would be a subject to just revisit at the next Planet Potentiary in 2022. I think that the subject is important, obviously, and we will continue to work the satellite community as a whole with the governments to solve this problem in a cooperative way and, of course, not simply blindly referring to the related articles and the regulation, but with the open discussion and awareness. So that's really what I wanted to say for an introduction. I thank everyone for their attention and I believe there may be a few minutes for questions now or at the end of the interview. Thank you. Thank you again for sharing your experience and this delicate issue of interference to GSO as well. And you mentioned about geolocation, but before the geolocation you already explained some mitigation techniques that you are already putting in place and I guess there are also other techniques that you cannot share because it's a way to protect your systems which are operating. Is there any danger that applying geolocation or geolocation which today is more and more precise but sometimes it's not 100 precise and this ellipse could introduce to another country or sovereignty of administrations? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I guess it's always very, very sensitive when you talk about in a way geolocation is sort of saying, okay, you're naming an administration and holding them responsible and it is a very sensitive subject. But remember, first of all, when you do geolocation you have a very precise set of a range so you can say an area of which you are certain that it's within a certain area it's usually an ellipse and you have a certainty that it's in with that and near certainty that it's within that ellipse. The ellipse could be close enough to a border or near a border that it may not be 100% absolutely certain which administration responsible. As an operator or as setting of course we'll take that into account with any response that's made. You will say, this is we'll send it to two administrations or three administrations depending on if the ellipse is really in a conjunction of more countries but it's important to do that. In the IQ range of administrations, if you're talking about looking for a resolution for a transmission we're obliged to find the responsible administration it's in the regular regulations you can't do it any other way. I think work with us, the cooperation with the ITU with the accredited and stations which are run by the administrations under the guidance under the supervision of the ITU or whatever you want to call it are very important in that way but yes, I think I appreciate the sensitivity but we'd still need to respect all of the obligations and all of the rights of every administration we still need to communicate where the stations are likely to be committing from. It was just a question about accuracy but certainly we do need this information because this is the way we can address our communications to the so thanks again and we will try to we are already at the end of the initially we have extended but we have one more interesting presentation in another service and then we'll go to the Q&A panel at the end so in this case the next speaker is Gerard Berz who is working for Euro control which has studied electrical engineering with the focus on navigation system at Embry-Radle Aeronautical University and Ohio University his work experience includes the US Naval air systems command and sky guide the navigation space provider of Switzerland 14 years working at Euro control as I said he leads and contributes to a variety of aviation working groups on navigation and spectrum matters and we move as we said to radio navigation satellite services Gerard okay thank you for that kind introduction so I'll try to be quick about it but still introduce you to the domain of aeronautical use of space systems so our systems are split up into navigation communication and surveillance systems where navigation is there to guide the pilot and then communication and surveillance is used for an air traffic controller to talk to not only one pilot but several pilots and keep aircraft safely separated this is the universe of the air navigation services where CNS plays one part I like here that is highlighted also that we have search and rescue and meteorological services which are very important in aviation so their two satellites play an interesting role so without CNS there's no air traffic management and of course that all requires spectrum it's a responsibility under the Chicago convention of the international civil aviation organization that said there are quite a lot of pressures on aviation first one being safety and security and I put these in parentheses because they're not really pressures in that sense as you see now with the COVID crisis if passengers don't feel safe if they are afraid to get sick or such they don't fly and that has brought a very unprecedented especially in terms of its magnitude crisis on aviation but cost pressures have always been alive and if you see what the industry has achieved and being able to fly passengers from to be at a very reasonable price make that available for most citizens of this earth to actually exchange and visit it's quite an accomplishment but of course it's also an intense pressure lately has also come the added pressure of the environment and so I put spectrum at the end with a question mark because certainly right now an airline CEO he's not worrying about spectrum what we do worry about is being able to fly safely and efficiently primarily and that's where satellites actually play quite an enormous role for those of you that have good eyes spot here the little red dot which is not perfectly the scale but that is roughly the coverage of a terrestrial high power enroute station you compare that to a footprint of a geostationary or geosynchronous satellite it's of course no competition whatsoever so we've embraced global calm nav and surveillance where SATCOM provides trans-oceanic remote area connectivity pilots are no longer using HF single sideband but actually can talk and communicate with data to air traffic control for trans-oceanic and remote crossings in navigation GNSS global navigation satellites have supported performance based navigation that are no longer tied to where nav aides are located on the ground it has enabled free routes and global surveillance is also starting up an emerging global flight tracking is this one initiative after some accidents that have made the news in recent years where aircraft were lost at seas well let's please no longer use an aircraft and that's where global surveillance also plays a great role now to do all of that the tricky thing is that we normally share these systems they're not aviation specific system where all the terrestrial aviation systems are built specifically for aviation and they have fairly demanding requirements in terms of a CNS system design to not contribute in any irrelevant fashion to the high level target level of safety an interesting example where we are active as your control where one of our main activities is air traffic flow management is the network management function where now with space based ADSB where ADSB broadcast the GPS position to air traffic control centers such that air traffic control centers can see where everybody is is that we have Europe plus a one hour horizon and then plus a six hour ring and with that we see what traffic is coming into the network and what the network manager does is to balance sector loads so an air traffic controller can control only a given number of aircraft if all of a sudden he has too many aircraft to deal with he sends them into a holding loop turning circles and that is of course not an efficient way of using resources so your control depends very much on having an accurate picture of traffic coming into the European network and of course other regions of the world are going that way as well it's also a very powerful tool for post operations analysis to see what was efficient what did work well or how can we do things better so in terms of optimization of the network flows of traffic these are really fantastic tools to focus now on the more navigation application side of things when we say GNSS what we mean is a core consolation which is either GPS GLONASS, Galileo or Beidou combined with an augmentation which is either aircraft space or ground based and these are designed specifically to meet aviation requirements for a particular phase of flight the United States and the Russian Federation have offered GPS and GLONASS respectively to IKO in letters of commitment and that sparked the development of IKO standards and recommended practices that then were published in 2001 for the first time including GNSS and by now pretty much all aircraft with only very few exception are equipped with at least one typically a GPS L1 frequency receiver using aircraft based integrity algorithms to meet aviation requirements. We're very busy at the IKO NAV systems panel to include Galileo on Beidou and update new signals on GPS and GLONASS expanding to the L5 frequency and that of course we're operating under the RNSS allocation as you're all well familiar with. An interesting thing is also that actually industry manufacturers are putting GNSS in the many different things that it's becoming difficult to know what exactly can go wrong if GNSS is being interfered with. So what about vulnerabilities? This has been a longstanding concern in the aviation industry we have designed the augmentation of service designs to cater for system malfunctions we have developed models for multi-path ionosphere troposphere to correct them and to filter them. So they're pretty okay. With radio frequency interference that remains the most significant vulnerability where it should simply limit it to the physics of space based systems as people in this audience well know. So because of this vulnerability we have launched a development of radio frequency interfered mitigation plan that is published in an Ikea document 9849 it's pretty much a three-step process where first we monitor threats once we understand the threats we assess the risk we figure out how big a deal it is and if we say oh something needs to be done we put up mitigation barriers and that all gets integrated in our safety management systems. What kind of mitigation barriers can we put up? So first of all we would like the interference not to happen in the first place so that is outreach and IT regulation that plays a biggest role here. Once it does happen we wish of course it did not affect our operation so there's onboard avionics capabilities that can sometimes prevent that navigation service is lost and finally if it is lost we want to limit the severity of impact. For that we need of course also observability from threat monitoring networks and another way of calling these barriers that has been used by the one of the fathers of a GPS Brad Parkinson is to protect tough and augment so those are sort of the three main angles of attack main areas of attack that we have to try and limit the interference. Now the first step being visibility we started asking pilots what you need to realize about pilots is that they report outages they do not report interference sometimes they may speculate that it is interference but it is strictly speaking just an outage and then we do an additional analysis to actually see whether it is most likely interference and that has been confirmed unfortunately and you see in the last two years we got up to an average of about 10 GPS reports daily from the cockpit so this is something that has a known operational impact this has gone down now of course but we also know that some locations keep getting reports here you see a bit what is being seen in the cockpit where you see this is really not a pilot with having lots of people in the back of his aircraft having to deal with this for example a terrain warning where the pilot is clever enough he knows where he is and he does not follow it because he knows it is a malfunction but normally we teach pilots to trust their systems and to strictly follow what a safety system tells them so these are things that we have to learn to deal with that are putting new operational principles that have not been around when you look at where these things are one of the things that is surprising is that a lot of them are in our hot spots are the Middle East to Europe routes across the Black and Caspian Sea it is the routes that go via the Mediterranean Sea Cyprus Airspace Malta but also flights from Canada and US to the Middle East via cross polar routes there are some also in Western Europe and so I want to just show you on the example of Cyprus with whom we have a good cooperation what these events actually look like we did have a flight conducted by DLR the German Aerospace Research Center they have an experimental antenna on their research aircraft this is an Airbus A320 which is many you are familiar with from going to ITU meetings for sure the track on the left is what they flown track on the right shows when GPS was available and this of course a very fundamentally different picture and multiple GPS related alerts were seen in the cockpit so this is not something that you would call a stable RNSS service unfortunately interestingly enough the hot spots that we see in our data are also seen by the maritime industry so this is from Catherine Dunn Fortune magazine and pretty much the hot spots that you see here the sensitivity of this that has just been talked about yes there are sensitive hot spots but still you have for example a report that I got from the US GPS user support where the ship going from Cyprus in the bay route not no GPS signal available not even once so that is not something that is very good operationally so we start operational analysis because of that we look at the traffic and of course from ADSP reporting we get the tracks from those we pick out those that actually have gaps and so those where GPS was interrupted so here you see the gaps of GPS on these tracks this helps us to do two things the first priority is to manage operational impact such that air traffic control knows which aircraft might actually need help in navigating it also of course looking at multiple aircraft means that we know that multiple aircraft have a problem so that pretty much excludes the possibility of an individual Iveonics aircraft fault so we know it must be an external problem that is most likely interference the second one that has been mentioned also in this webinar where a number of measurements have identified a hotspot over Syria which is understandable as a zone of conflict but this geolocation map that uses the power difference of arrival approach is identifying the locations of probable interference source locations this has a heat map so it's not quite an ellipse but you also see that unfortunately a lot of it is over international open waters which then means that it becomes quite difficult in terms of radio regulatory enforcement this has raised enough concern if I speak to aviation aircraft operators if I spoke to them 10 years ago about interference they told me go away GPS always works now they're ringing the alarm bells they're saying look we want GPS to work with us a lot in our cockpits please do something and so you see here the measures that have been endorsed by IKO as a result of the recent 40th assembly I'll leave that to your reading pleasure and I'll go into detail in the interest of time what does this mean for us well I do wonder about is do you need to to these people that do this electronic warfare it's linked to conflict zones but do we really need to interfere with an aircraft 300 kilometers away and at 10 kilometers altitude distance because of course as has been said already jammers can be detected and locations can be determined and we are developing these capabilities so that more and more we can actually see where the jamming is coming from the thing that is worrying about this if the cockpit messages haven't warned you enough is that well you know we have safety nets and a design that says ok if a single component fails we don't really suffer too bad we have back up but then if ever multiple CNS elements are degraded it becomes really difficult to maintain a safe operation and this is especially challenging over international water where ground based service coverage is of course more difficult to achieve what we are developing and what we are pushing is that we have direct interference report at the receiver such that the pilot doesn't need to figure out whether it's interference and then hopefully in future systems then report that to air traffic control such that we can actually pass that on to the radio regulator for enforcement so that's something that we're working on that will take some time to develop and of course we need to ensure safe and efficient operations a balanced mixed of both terrestrial and space based CNS systems that will have to complement each other the article 15 procedures have been mentioned Cyprus has written back in 2017 to the radio communication bureau unfortunately the aforementioned goodwill is not really present in the region so we would really hope that administrations in that region would actually react to such letters and actually try and see what they can do to reduce interference what we really hope for for aviation to continue benefiting from these great systems that are put up is that well can you please stop it or at least tune it down a bit we don't see why such large zones of international open waters need to be interfered with also important to know as soon as it is electronic warfare outside of a declared zone of conflict we would consider that a training exercise that would have to be coordinated with aviation and maritime sectors because airplanes do fly over water and they do have air traffic control that they're dealing with in those places what we also like to highlight is that this is a multi sector problem not just for aviation there are many other uses of GNSS that are benefiting citizens worldwide and so these multi sector problems also require multi sector solutions supported by ITU things in the spectrum planning compatibility of course are also things that need to be paid attention to such as not putting powerful terrestrial signals close to space signals such that compatibility can be ensured have enough guard bands etc and a lot can be done even if you're not from one of these conflict areas in your state there are illegal jammers that you can buy on Amazon today and not much is being done to take these devices that are illegal everywhere from the market usually there's a fine print somewhere that says it's the customer's responsibility to figure out whether it is illegal to operate in a given state but of course if you take the ITU treaty rules then these are not legal anywhere my thanks goes to my colleagues there's always people involved in this and it's a good effort to keep these systems going and safe you see here the many systems that and radio links that an aircraft relies on that we're hoping to reduce those but what we need is a safe operation where air traffic controllers can guide pilots safely to their destination and that would be the end of my presentation it has one more slide that gives you links for further reading for those that look at the slides afterwards thank you thank you Gerard we are extended in time but certainly we have almost 500 participants still with us which is quite a good sign so if it is fine for you maybe we will make you one question we are picking up here from the audience and then we can go to the panel to do one more question each one so hopefully by 5pm the question for you Gerard is how will your control solve the problem of jammers trying to put down drones by transmitting at the drone the GPS frequencies yeah that's a new issue lots of people are coming to us and asking what to do about it exactly we hear of a number of cases where for example police jammers have been authorized but we have not really had cases where they've really been used so we have not seen what sort of collateral damage they could cause what we would hope is to get more data from the system designers of you know such drone jammers there is a standards working group busy with that but we don't really have enough experience with the subject yet to give specific recommendations but we're well aware that this is a difficult and complex issue ok maybe so to replace this complex issue question I can pose you another difficult question as well sorry but this one is related to spoofing and cyber security I don't know if you can elaborate a bit more on that yeah of course so we this is an even more sensitive topic and so we we study that topic but of course we don't talk about it much what you have seen on the slides is that there are many systems in the aircraft they also include inertial navigation systems and our studies so far indicate that when it comes to spoofing it is quite difficult to spoof an aircraft now it is relatively easy to spoof an aircraft in an easy way let's put it that way there was a case in Hanover some years ago where a gps re-radiator was badly adjusted and that put an aircraft on approach on a static position and of course the pilot does recognize that he's flying and that he's not static and so he disregards this information right away but to actually mislead an aircraft in a hazardous way that is something that is according to our studies and our knowledge at this point is still quite difficult to do but we are developing mitigation measures there as well and it becomes very manufacturer specific so we work closely with a manufacturer such that they can give recommendations to their operators on that topic thank you so well we still have five ten minutes if everybody is still with energy maybe we could make one more question to each panelist so as I said we have still a good audience of 440 so we need to fit this audience which are really interested in our so one question could go for Glenn at NASA do you think this is not so technical but it's more about the space protocol do you think that bringing the space protocol would help in reducing and regulating the space traffic ooh space traffic you know that's one that comes up from time to time and it's a certainly a something that in my mind it kind of it's not a spectrum issue I've always looked things primarily as spectrum issues but space traffic it's getting busy up there it's also connected with the issue of orbital debris which is also a very important issue but I haven't I generally try to separate those things from the spectrum policies which are really where I focus my attention on but we also are looking at for work work 23 there's agenda item 1.6 1.6 is an interesting one and NASA's been working actually in cooperation with our regulatory authority for aeronautical systems the FAA in the United States looking at sub orbital vehicles and how to coordinate launches within national airspace and air traffic operations years ago it was if somebody launched a rocket into space it was on the evening news now it's happening so often that it's not news at all unless there's something really exciting in the pointy end of the rocket that's going into space so the old protocols we had for well a launch is a one off and we can coordinate these things with air traffic on a case by case basis is becoming cumbersome now so I think we do need to in particular look for launch events how do we better coordinate things it's not necessarily a spectrum issue or an RFI issue but there are safety and issues of routing how you route things and everybody knowing that yes there's as you go you have planes at high altitudes going left to right you got rockets punching a hole through that plane where the air traffic may be going so there are concerns there and there are some things that we definitely need to look at okay thank you Glen so Elena you have described a lot of efforts in terms of reporting and trying to mitigate and mitigating itself the RFI for a small mission and in your view which are the main lessons that you have learned from this experience that you may share with the audience of course thank you for the question Jorge I think that for the case of SMOS one of the very first team that we were very thankful to the development team is the importance of the good selectivity so it's extremely important for passive sensor especially those operating in purely passive band to have a good selectivity to make sure that this operating within the allocated band and minimizing to the maximum what is taken from the adjacent bands with active service that was one of the very first lessons learned we have realized also the importance of putting together the efforts to have a team for the RFI detection mitigation and reporting that is time demanding requires efforts, requires also cost, manpower and that is something that in the case of SMOS that was not foreseen and that is quite common in space missions that is not part of the shopping list and that is something that has been lesson learned and finally something that we have seen is that as far as all the RFI reporting is interesting, the most important is when you establish a good communication with the administration that is what we have seen that really is what works and that is that follow up of the cases, but at the end can be a happy story and minimizing the the RFIs thank you thank you Elena yes that is trying to figure out maybe we will jump to Gerard now because we don't have the same order but perhaps oh that also sounds interesting Gerard there were some questions related to current issues relating to aviation system 5G or future 6G do you hear? yeah so one of the current issues is the development of 5G and the potential for interferences in the radio altimeter band from 4.2 to 4.4 gigahertz radio altimeters are used for the final phases of flight so it's for measuring proximity to the runway and initiate the flare maneuver and so this is they're also used in other flight phases for other things but this is one of our most safety critical systems it's of course at the airport where it's being used which is the same place where 5G operators understandably wish to deploy 5G base stations so this is one where that will need a lot of activity in the coming years to ensure that 5G and radio altimeters get along especially because unfortunately many passengers are not putting their phones into airplane mode when they fly and so as the aircraft comes in for a landing and all these smart phones are coming into range of the base stations we don't want then all this traffic being picked up with everybody downloading emails that can be a significant RF load that is then sent directly to the aircraft so those are things where of course we need future more coordination and cooperation to make sure we have interference free operations one thing that I'd like to point out is that mobile broadband is linked to mobility and so from that air transport, land transport, sea transport should really be seen as a partner in mobile broadband and that of course we need to make sure that all of our systems work together to provide a good mobile experience to be at the traveling public or essential government services okay thank you so the last one I think is a very easy one or well very easy one to say is that we need to go for ETHAN because considering the time we should start to stop but we can just answer one more about the geolocation you spoke about ETH and well we more or less know but there are some participants who are asking more if you can explain how to obtain or geolocate a source of interference okay yes I notice as well that there are a number of questions on the chat could you put a diagram on the screen is it possible right now right okay so let me go back to the first one so this is a diagram from a well I'm taking it shamelessly from a seminar symposium that was in Geneva it's by the operator of the Liham station run by the German administrator so I use it without his permission but I'm sure he wouldn't mind and this shows a scenario of sharing of geolocation it's called their system is a transmitter location system so you have the main station on the lower left which is the actual monitoring station which is part of the memorandum of cooperation of the ITU you have the interfered satellite which is being interfered by the interferer on the right you have a neighboring satellite which also receives part of that interfering signal even though it's a very low level but of course no antenna is perfect so it bleeds over to the other satellite and you can receive both of those signals at the space radio monitoring station you also can add if you want and it's not necessary mobile reference transmitters which further increase the accuracy and those can be located mobily over here just to give another point and it's kind of a little bit the same kind of calculation that a GPS would use to give your location on the ground in a GPS handset it's quite relevant from what we just heard before but of course it was never intended you're using information which is normally not useful that you just extrapolate to find a position whereas of course GPS signals are perfectly tuned to actually precisely pinpoint your location so that's basically how it works to add to that I mentioned in my presentation that you are now we're now putting on the satellite payload equipment that can even more accurately with just a single satellite a single interfered satellite can actually tell where exactly the interferers come from and it's strange how that came about it came about because those same satellites also are able to put blanking so nose in their satellite in their electronic array satellites so of course once you're going to put something that blanks puts a null in the received diagram to null out to the location where there's an interferer but then of course you also know precisely where that interferer is and you can communicate that information so what that gives you this is a 40 page presentation on a two-day seminar so obviously I'm just giving you a few excerpts but this shows some tests that were made this is around Paris Rambouillet which is on the left that's one of our we also had that's but these were just cooperative experiments to show validate the geolocation and you see two different ellipses a long one and a smaller one I won't go into the details but it's just showing how different elements of the system can give you increasingly precise pinpointing of where the location of the transmitter these weren't real interferers these were just pretend interferers of course we don't interfere from our earth station in Rambouillet eventually ever but you'll see that the smaller ellipse is actually quite small if you look at the scale of the map so you have already quite a good idea even from just without any further equipment specialized equipment on the satellite up on the sky you get a very good location estimation as to where the emitter is and so that's I hope that answers the question if you go into further detail I would I think there's plenty of information that you can look at to get the full technical technical scope of what's actually done but this is a basic concept it was a very good graphic visualization and the answer was good so we are at the end now and I would like to share the results of the poll we launched during this almost two hours of webinar we started ten minutes late just waiting for a full connection of audience so during this poll we have launched there were 58% of the audience who have participated and the first question was dedicated to know your views if the interference environment is going to affect satellite systems in the coming year how it would be and 76% of the audience answered that it would be more complex with higher interference incidents these are your views the second question was about is the current international regulatory framework sufficient to resolve the cases of harmful interference that cannot be prevented through the usual coordination and identification procedures and in this case 50% said no additional measures could be included under ITU legal instruments and regulation and the last question it was about what do you think if non-GSO constellation will bring a new pattern of interference cases and for the last question there was 54% which said surely the transient nature of the interference created by a non-GO system will change the way the impact of interference will be assessed so these are very important insights from you from the audience as we said we were today 550 participants and we are really happy and proud and thank all of you for such an important participation from the industry from the governments and especially for the speakers for your time we will spend even one more hour with even more detailed discussions but unfortunately we have to stop now we are already 45 minutes again thank you all and well don't forget that this is just the very first episode we will have the next one in October, 7th of October dedicated to NGO constellations for proven applications and again thank you so much and have a wonderful day or night