 I'd like to introduce Don. He's come to us through our ham radio networks and one of the big important parts of the radio spectrum is that it's going to be allocated from somewhere which is where Don will introduce us to. There's really two aims that we have with the kits is that the kits are really designed to use the 27 megahertz ISM band but there's a lot of hams who want to use it for every other handband on HF. So there's more than just the ISM bands out there and so this is why we wanted to cover some of these issues. Okay, I'll hand it over to Don. Okay. Thanks, Kim. I don't know what your background is. I don't know whether you're radio hams and know everything about spectrum or your Linux people and you're wondering what this radio spectrum stuff is and why don't they make a fuss about it. So please excuse me if some of the stuff sounds like revision. It may not be. And this is ad hoc password. Okay, I'll just go back up to the first slide. Just who am I? Don Wallace, ZL2TLL. For those that aren't radio hams, that means I'm a radio amateur in New Zealand with a call sign Zulu Limitutango Lima Lima. The other bits I'll talk about in a moment, which is the NZART-ALO, what that actually means. Okay, so we press the button on here and we have radio spectrum. First of all, just what are the various radio bands called? You hear about HF, you might hear about MF broadcast band, broadcast AM broadcast band up here, VHF broadcast band. This is the way in which around the world they actually classify the bands. Each is 10 times 30 kilohertz, 300 kilohertz and so on and so forth. What's the most important thing on the slide? The bit down the bottom. What does that mean? Radio spectrum, it's like land. You can't create any more of it. You can make better use of it, but you can't create any more of it. So you've got to work out how you share it out. Just some parallels between land and spectrum. First of all, you think about the area of land. How big is your, in New Zealand we would say our section, I think in Australia you call it a plot, is that right? How big is the plot of land that your building's on? Or how much bandwidth do you have in radio frequency terms? What's the capacity? How big is it? If you have land, you can lease land or you can buy land. Well the radio spectrum, you can't buy spectrum. The spectrum is owned by in New Zealand the Crown, Australia I suppose you'd call it the Crown as well, in other words by the government, the Commonwealth or whatever. You can lease it off them and when you lease it off them you have a radio license. Also, a few other things, a sports field. You think about a sports field, there are rules on a sports field as to what you're actually able to do on that sports field. It's not a free for all, it's a soccer field or it's a rugby field or it's Australian rules or one of those. So there's a whole set of rules you've got to follow as to what you do when you're using that sports field. An amateur radio band is a bit like that. It's some spectrum, some land that's being given to the amateurs but there are various rules about how you use it, what power you're allowed to use. And the fact that you're not allowed to send the cricket balls into the neighbour's place or things like that. And there's another thing called a public playground where you can do whatever you like. I think actually in the Linux side of things you talk about commons, common software, etc. There are no rules at all basically. And that's called an ISM band, industrial, scientific and medical band. And what is an ISM band? It's used by RF welders. You know those plastic raincoats you can get that have got nice welded seams. The welders that weld the plastic, they're RF welders, microwave ovens, cordless phones and Wi-Fi. All playing in the same public playground. Now you may say that doesn't make much sense. I mean Wi-Fi is really important. Why is it there? Why is it there? Because people like Cisco or the companies at Cisco bought in the States said we don't want to pay the federal government for radio licenses. So we're going to use a part of the spectrum that you don't have to buy licenses for. They call it license free, which isn't quite correct. But basically you don't have to buy licenses. It's free and therefore they use the ISM band. That's why when you have a look at home you'll find that your cordless phone for example or your router, your wireless router says do not put this by the microwave. Don't put your wireless router by your cordless phone because they're all sharing the same spectrum and interference can result. Okay we're now going to talk about where did these bands come from? Starting at the very top, an organization called the ITU. It was founded way back in 1865. It's part of the United Nations. It's located in Geneva and part of the ITU, the radio communications part of the ITU, the ITU-R, is 1865. Yeah back in the days of telegraphy you know and all that kind of stuff. The radio communications part is the one that sets up the, what people tend to think of as rules, they're called the International Radio Regulations, but they're in fact a treaty between companies, countries, agreement between countries that we are going to use this bit of spectrum for this purpose, this bit of spectrum for broadcasting, this bit for amateurs, we're going to use this bit over here for marine and so on and so forth. The overall rules for the system. In fact there's things called the International Radio Regulations and I wasn't traveling on a cheap ferry, I would have brought them with me. There's their A5 sized books, they're about, they're down at A5 and about that thick, full of the regulation saying what happens. WRC World Radio Conference 2015 is coming up at the end of this year. Every four years they look at the rules and say oh in fact every year recently they look at the rules and they say oh we need more for cellular, oh we need more for cellular. In New Zealand and in Australia we've both gone to digital television, why? To spare up some space for cellular. There will be 3,000 plus delegates there, I was at the last one on behalf of the organisation in New Zealand, 150 different countries represented and in some of the meetings called the, I've forgotten the name now, but anyway you all get together, the plenaries and there are 3,000 delegates in the hall. Don't get long to speak. Okay, why is it important? Well New Zealand or Australian interests from the point of view of economic development because the kind of kit that we use, take Wi-Fi kit for example, if it wasn't standardised, certainly New Zealand, if we had a New Zealand special one, I mean what manufacturer is worth, is going to be interested in manufacturing kit for just the New Zealand market or just the Australian market even if that matter. We tend to take standards from elsewhere. Okay, we might develop things but it's the big markets that people are going to manufacture kit for. Also, if you're out in your yacht going around the world, it might be quite useful for the emergency frequency to be the same in every country. So you don't have to tune to a different frequency here and different one here and so on and so forth. So that's the interoperability side of things. But also, my interest is from an amateur radio side of things and we are looking at, can we get some new bands? Somebody asked me before, when are you going to get the 60 metre band for us, 5 MHz? We're working on trying to get an allocation of 5 MHz. There's a lot of other. At the moment, it's allocated to mobile and fixed, primarily used by mobile. In New Zealand, we've got support from our regulator for getting an allocation, albeit it's limited support. In Australia, I understand there's no support at all because apparently it's used for the flying doctor service or something like that or some other rural service. Around the world, you've got to get an agreement as to whether you've got it or haven't got it so you know whether you can talk to people or you can't. And also, and this is a very important thing, one of the things you may not realise is that all of those bands I showed you before, they were all allocated to radio amateurs originally because there weren't any use for anything else people thought. And as technology comes along, new technologies, then okay amateurs, you had a bit of time to play with it. We'll give you a small segment of it to keep playing in and we've been very fortunate, we've got small segments right the way through the spectrum, but we're going to use the major part of it for a more useful something which is seen as being more useful. The amateurs don't necessarily see it that way. And an example of that is at 7075 gigahertz, there is a band at the moment which is exclusively allocated to radio amateurs. And it is likely we will lose part of that, because it's actually actually wanted for vehicle collision radar. So, you know, there's all these demands that come in and it's a matter of sharing out that spectrum. Okay, Asia Pacific telecommunity, what does that mean? That's the next level down. There are various regional groupings that get together. And if they can agree on a position, you know, if for example, we could persuade APT to agree that that having a five megahertz allocation of this particular type is a good idea, then basically all the votes of all of those countries, not there's ever any voting because we never do that when we do treaties, we always just talk about it and reach agreement. All of those countries support a particular position. And that's where APT comes in. APG 15.4 is about to be held in Bangkok. The previous one was in Brisbane, APG 15.3, and it's where all of the countries in the Asia Pacific region get together and say, we think this should be done, we think that should be done. And remember that we're talking about all the radio, all the items that are being thought about at the World Radio Conference, trying to form a common view on that. And then the New Zealand perspective. In New Zealand, we have an organisation called MB, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. It's one of those great big ministries that we, for some reason, have made over here. Within that, there's something called Radio Spectrum Management. And that's Radio Spectrum Management are the people who actually set the policy. But we're fortunate in that we've got a committee. You may have the same system in Australia, I don't know. But in New Zealand, we have a thing called the Radio Sector Committee. Industry, amateurs, government, etc, get together and have a bit of a discussion and say, yeah, we'll actually will support five megahertz for amateurs, a general item 1.4 as they call it. But we're concerned that may cause interference over here. So we might only support it in this particular way and so on and so forth. So all of the industry gets together and works on these things. In the same way, we can monitor other parts of the industry may say, yes, we definitely want 75 gigahertz for vehicle radar. Yeah, but what about the amateurs? So we can reach an agreement, a position. It's a conference preparatory committee is a CPG, lots of acronyms. CPG gets together and we end up with a document which is taken by the team to the next meeting of APT. And then eventually, at the end of this year, off to Geneva to actually work out the nitty gritty of what's going to happen and what's going to go in the regulations. Geneva is interesting. As I say, I was there last time, and we had the Russians there who said, we do not like the radio, they never do things right, do you know? I'm not quite sure what accent that is, but still. And then you have other people, some other countries who are against amateur radio in principle. And you have to kind of separate out the things from, is amateur radio, are you arguing about whether amateur radios should exist? So if you are, let's forget about that because it's in the ITU regulations that amateur radio exists. Let's actually argue about whether, as in the last conference, there should be an allocation at 500 kilohertz to amateurs or not. And in fact, we did end up with an allocation at 476 kilohertz, I think it is, to amateurs. And then the amateurs in New Zealand, NZART, by the way, is the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters. The equivalent of Australia is a wireless Institute of Australia, the HAM group. The ALO, the Administration Liaison Officer, which is what I am, has the job of representing the amateurs to the government. So my job, well, there's two ways of looking at it. Really, I'm there to be blamed if we lose any amateur bands. Okay. So that's my role is to act as that interface between the amateurs and the government. And what's NZART? You can see that the objects of NZART maintenance and expansion of the amateur service in New Zealand. Probably pretty similar to what the objects of the WIA are as well. And my job, I'm appointed by the council, so I can be fired by the council of the organisation. Working with the administration, other national and international groups. That's important, because, you know, if you've got a group that is, let's take five megahertz, which was a particular group in New Zealand that uses five megahertz, talking to them, I'm saying, what kind of is acceptable to you so that we can come up with a position that the regulator is going to put forward on behalf of New Zealand? There's no point in just going baldheaded into things and saying, right, we want all of it, please. And the other people say, well, actually, no, we're using it at the moment, so go away. And there's also a linkage, of course, back to a thing called the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, which is the the group that represents all of the amateur societies throughout the world. And we all work with that to form international positions, which then come back down again into the various countries, and we try and persuade our administration to support the positions. And I think, oh, the role, this this is the formal one off. This is what happens when you take something out of out of windows and put it into into Linux. But the formal one is you've got the members, we've then got counsel who decide what to what the the members want, they then come to me, I then go to the ministry. But the way I like to look at it, look at it actually is in the next one, which probably has the same mess behind it, basically, a funnel. And you'll notice that the funnel comes like this. There should actually be one in the middle. But you can see these things turn around. They're not they're not just pretty corus, which you may have heard of your visitors from Australia. But they also say that sometimes it doesn't actually get through. And it's reality. You're negotiating. You're negotiating a position to try and get the best deal you can for the radio amateurs. Questions? Kim? Oh, sorry, question it back. You have a question. Oh, sorry, you asked the question, why not? When can we have a six meter band now analog television has gone? The answer is we have got back the six meter band in New Zealand. Ah, OK, sorry. What you what you. OK, the question is about when are we going to have a proper six meter band in New Zealand as distinct from the the arrangement we've got at the moment, basically. And the answer to that is very simple. What what actually happened was that television licenses in New Zealand were granted by the crown to various television transmitters. To do that, they set up a particular mechanism, which they put all the television frequencies and all particularly the the VHF ones and then said, OK, you can have this frequency, you can have that frequency, you can have this frequency. That particular arrangement hasn't expired yet. Expires later this year. When it expires later this year, it just becomes spectrum like any other spectrum and can become a proper amateur license. The reason why it causes amateurs a little bit of a problem in New Zealand at the moment is that most of our bands, we have a limit on transmitter power of 1000 watts, 1000 watts transmitter power, PEP. On this particular segment of the six meter band, because it's four megahertz wide, the 50 to 51 megahertz segment, it's one kilowatt EIP, effective incident radiated power, which the difference between the two is that if you've got a big antenna, you can increase your effective power. So for this particular segment, you can't use big antennas at the moment, but come later this year, the old mechanism will disappear and the new mechanism will be there. The thing to remember is that we could have actually not been given access to segment at all until later this year, but they said no, you can have access to this segment, provided you obey these rules in the meantime and we have to obey the rules, they have to be set up that way because the way the license is crafted, the way power is measured is as effective instant radiated power, which basically means the power that you standing in front of the antenna will be radiated with and your internal organs will get warm with etc. So that's the reason for that. The other thing, 698m3 to 800m3 transmits for wireless microphones, so they are now unable to be used because they have given that for G3 data. Yeah. Yeah. That's been awesome. And that's what happens over time. Sorry. Okay. Can you repeat the question? Yeah, the question was, given that these terrible radio hams, you're not a radio ham, are you? Because radio hams always are well behaved. They always follow all of the rules. They're not like Linux people, you know. Not at all, not at all. Anyway, how's that police? Probably the best way is to give you an example. Our limit used to be, I think, 500 watts. 300. 300, and we got it increased. I can actually claim to have had some effect there. We got an increase to 1000 watts. Prior to that, there was a person prosecuted in Christchurch for running 1.5 kilowatts. How was he prosecuted and why was he prosecuted? Well, the answer was very simple. He was stupid enough to boast on YouTube that he was doing it. You know, it's like the people that hold up shops and leave their ID cards behind. The reality is that if there is an interference complaint, the radio inspectors who are part of radio frequency management, they will actually go out and look at the complaint if it's serious enough. But are they out there checking every day? No, they're not. Yeah, and the second question? Let me answer that because it's an interesting one. From the point of view of the radio regulations, the answer is no. The radio regulations, depending which bandit is, either set a maximum transmitter power, PEP, peak envelope power, as you said before, or they set an EIRP power. However, that has nothing to do with the local authority and the local council, whatever you like to call it, who may decide, or your neighbour may decide, they don't actually like what your aerial looks like or it might fall over or it's lowering the value of the neighbourhood. Therefore you should not be allowed it and we'll make some rules about it. So two different answers to the same question. As far as we have a thing in New Zealand, the other thing that's different from Australia, by the way, is that we do not have an annual licence fee here. We have a general user radio licence, which all radio amateurs get access to once they've passed the test. We do have licence fees for repeaters and for beacons and other things that require protection, but for normal amateurs, there is no licence fee. And the GURL says what power you're allowed to use and so on and so forth. And the third one, last one for you? Yeah. Yeah. The answer is that first of all, nobody is out there regularly in New Zealand at least, regularly listening to the bands and measuring and trying to, because it's not possible in fact to actually measure remotely power, monitoring things. What happens is complaints come in and when complaints come in, they're then prioritised and fed through the system. And if the complaint is thought to be serious enough. Yeah. For example, if that happened to be on the same frequency as one of the commercial transmitters and they made a complaint and said we are being interfered with, it might happen quite quickly, because they're paying lots of licence fees for that. Anything to do with mobile phones? Potentially, yeah. No, really fast in Australia. Yeah. There's a huge amount of background hash on all the bands and some of it's spiky, some of it's almost white noise. And there's nothing we can do about it. Okay. Well, there are international regulations, but most of the regulations regarding radiated noise or conducted noise measure the noise output from a particular unit. They don't take into account the fact that you may have, for example, lead light bulbs or CFD light bulbs with little inverters in them, and you may have thousands of them. Now, I can't remember the exact number, but in Auckland here, by the way, what happened downstairs with the power going out in the workshop, it happens in the whole of Auckland occasionally as well. And when that happened, somebody actually noticed the noise floor reduced by something like 20 dB or 30 dB. Wow. It's something I have raised about, you know, what about the cumulative effect of all of these CFDs and lead lights and so on and so forth. But they're all approved overseas and what power has little New Zealand got to persuade the manufacturers in Europe and in the States and various other places to make something which is less noisy if it's all right in the States so it must be all right in the rest of the world. On import? Not on import. Sorry? Well, that is done. Yes, but what I'm saying is the standards that have been set internationally are for an individual unit and they don't take into account the fact that if you have 10,000, 100,000, a million light bulbs, each with its own inverter, then the overall effect on the noise floor is to increase it a lot. Yep. You're not allowed to know. Just really quickly, in my very primitive understanding with the square-of-the-distance role in terms of propagation and falling off, wouldn't that mean then the net effect of all of those individual inverters would be a lot less because you're not measuring it from the same point? If they're all in your street, no. And then the problem is the rate at which it drops off depends also on the frequency. I suspect you're an HF operator, is that right? At HF the rate of drop-off is much, much lower than it is at VHF or UHF or whatever. So it depends on a whole series of parameters, but basically for the HF operator it means the noise floor has risen and will continue to rise. So there's not much we can do about it. I mean we can keep asking, we can keep pushing for it and maybe we'll have some of the commercial users in the HF area helping us along in that way as well. But I mean we get pretty good value for our license fee because we don't pay one. Okay, I think I'd better hand over the next one.