Review of FCC Order 20-48 Authorizing Operation of a Terrestrial Radio Network Near the GPS Frequency Bands

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This report reviews Federal Communications Commission order FCC 20-48, which authorized Ligado Networks LLC to operate a low-power terrestrial radio network adjacent to the Global Positioning System (GPS) frequency band. It considers how best to evaluate harmful interference to civilian and defense users of GPS, the potential for harmful interference to GPS users and DOD activities, and the effectiveness and feasibility of the mitigation measures proposed in the FCC order.

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116 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-69007-2
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-69008-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/26611

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Analysis of Potential Interference Issues Related to FCC Order 20-48. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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J. Michael McQuade

J. Michael McQuade is a strategic advisor at Carnegie Mellon University where he recently stepped down as Vice President for Research. From 2006 to 2018 he served as Senior Vice President for Science & Technology at United Technologies Corporation, where he provided strategic oversight and guidance for research, engineering, and development activities that focused on a broad range of high-technology products and services for the global aerospace and building systems industries. Dr. McQuade has also held senior positions with technology development and business oversight at 3M, Imation, and Eastman Kodak. He served as Vice President of 3M’s Medical Division and President of Eastman Kodak’s Health Imaging Business. He has broad experience managing basic technology development and the conversion of early-stage research into business growth. Dr. McQuade has served as a member of the Presidents Council of Advisor on Science and Technology, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, and the Defense Innovation Board, and is a member on the National Academies’ National Science, Technology, and Security Roundtable and its Protecting Critical Technologies for National Security consensus study. Dr. McQuade received a Ph.D. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jennifer Lacroix Alvarez

Jennifer Alvarez is currently the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairperson of the Board for Aurora Insight Inc. Ms. Alvarez co-founded Aurora Insight and started as the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) in 2017 and led the development of the foundational technologies for sensing the radio frequency environment from land, air and space, with a particular focus on emerging 5G technologies and the challenges associated with spectrum, including its general lack of availability and interference. Prior to co-founding Aurora Insight, Ms. Alvarez served in numerous roles at Southwest Research Institute beginning in 1992. She performed extensive work on GPS interference, including developing detection and mitigation techniques and systems for GPS jammers and spoofers. She led multi-disciplinary research efforts to develop innovative solutions in radio frequency signal acquisition and processing for cooperative, non-cooperative, and interfering signals. Her innovations included new radio frequency sensing technologies for cognitive radio applications and advanced methods for passively sensing and extracting information about signals and waveforms. Alvarez was CTO and is currently CEO of Aurora Insight, which provided Ligado Networks, Inc. with consulting services in 2018. Ms. Alvarez holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at San Antonio, where her Master’s thesis focused developing a communication technique that exploited certain characteristics of GPS signals.

Alvarez was CTO and is currently CEO of Aurora Insight, which provided Ligado Networks, Inc. with consulting services in 2018.

Kristine M. Larson

Kristine M. Larson is professor emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder and a research associate at Central Washington University. Dr. Larson’s research has focused on using Global Positioning System (GPS) signals for geoscience research. In addition to using GPS to measure global and regional crustal deformation, she has developed new applications for GPS, including measuring seismic displacements, soil moisture, vegetation water content, precise time & frequency synchronization, snow depth, volcanic ash, tsunami waves, tides and lake levels. She has served on several National Academies committees, including the Committee on National Requirements for Precise Geodetic Infrastructure. She received the 2015 Huygens Medal from the European Geosciences Union. In 2020 Dr. Larson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the Whitten Medal from the American Geophysical Union. She earned a B.A. in engineering sciences from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences (geophysics) from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

John L. Manferdelli

John is currently Confidential Computing Incubation Leader, VMware where he leads security innovation projects in the Office of the CTO. Before that, he was Professor of the Practice and Executive Director of the Cyber Security and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University. Immediately prior to that he was Engineering Director for Production Security Development at Google. Prior to Google, John was a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation and co-PI (with David Wagner) for the Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing at the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to Intel, John was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft and was an affiliate faculty member in computer science at the University of Washington. Prior to that, John founded a Natural Language Company that was acquired by Microsoft and worked at Bell Labs, Livermore Labs and TRW. John was also a member of the Information Science and Technology advisory group at DARPA and is a member of the Defense Science Board. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Cyber Resilience Forum. John’s professional interests include cryptography and cryptographic mathematics, combinatorial mathematics, operating systems, computer security and IoT. He is a licensed Radio Amateur (AI6IT). Manferdelli has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Preston F. Marshall

Dr. Preston F. Marshall is an Engineering Director at Google, LLC, responsible for spectrum access technology, including a focus on the creation of a vibrant ecosystem of equipment, users, and standards in the newly shared 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band. He is chair of the Wireless Innovation Forum Spectrum Sharing Subcommittee, developing the technology base for 3.5 GHz spectrum sharing, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the CBRS (now OnGo) Alliance, developing coexistence and neutral host technology for the 3.5 GHz band. He has a new book on this subject, “Three Tier Shared Spectrum, Shared Infrastructure, and a Path to 5G”, recently released by Cambridge University Press, as well as two prior works on Cognitive Radio. He has been heavily involved in wireless technology and policy, including: Deputy Director of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California; and Director of the ISI Center for Computer Science and Technology; a Research Professor at USC’s Electrical Engineering Department; a contributor to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) spectrum study that led to the creation of the CBRS band, and a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced research Projects Agency (DARPA), directing multiple wireless and sensing technology programs. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, and a MS and BS from Lehigh University in Electrical Engineering.

Mark Psiaki

Mark Psiaki is the Kevin T. Crofton Faculty Chair in Aerospace & Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he has taught since 2016, and he is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, where he taught for 30 years. He spent two sabbatical leaves as a Lady Davis Visiting Associate Professor with the Aerospace Engineering Faculty at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and one sabbatical leave as an NRC Senior Research Associate at the Space Vehicles Directorate of the AFRL in Albuquerque, NM. His contributions lie in the areas of estimation, filtering, data fusion, and signal detection with applications to GPS/GNSS navigation, alternative navigation methods, spacecraft attitude and orbit determination, and remote sensing of the upper atmosphere. He has authored or co-authored more than 80 refereed journal articles, 75 additional conference papers and trade magazine articles, 1 book chapter, and 10 U.S. patents. He is a Fellow of both the Institute of Navigation (ION) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He has received the ION’s Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and Burka awards, the Technion’s Meir Hanin International Memorial Prize, and 6 best paper awards for AIAA conferences. Mark Psiaki earned a B.A. in Physics (1979), an M.A. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (1984), and a Ph.D. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (1987), all from Princeton University.

Richard L. Reaser, Jr.

Richard L. (Rick) Reaser, Jr., has been a self-employed, independent consultant since January 2020. He provides independent consulting services to U.S.-CREST on Global Positioning System (GPS) and general space technology and markets. In the Spring of 2021, he provided independent consulting services Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company in the performance of technical and market due diligence to assess the viability of an aviation innovation. He provided independent consulting services to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through the Aerospace Corporation with a systems engineering program assessment of the Artemis program in Spring 2020. From 2006 to 2019, Mr. Reaser led Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems’ Spectrum Management and Electromagnetic Environmental Effects Department. He was an Air Force Officer from 1978 to 2006 when he retired as a Colonel. While in the Air Force, Reaser served in the Air Force’s GPS Joint Program Office (JPO) twelve years across three duty tours as a satellite engineer, satellite contract manager, chief engineer, and deputy system program director. While serving as the Defense Department’s deputy director of spectrum management, he was detailed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense to the White House and the State Department as a technical advisor to the US Ambassador to the World Radiocommunications Conference (WRC). In the late 1990’s he was selected as U.S. spokesperson and leader of the interagency effort to prevent GPS spectrum encroachment. He helped the US and Europe obtain new international spectrum for GPS and Galileo at two World Radio Conferences (2000 and 2003). He negotiated the technical agreement between the Europe Union (EU) and the United States to share spectrum between the two systems in 2004. He led the design efforts for three new GPS civil signals L1C, L2C and L5 as well the new military signal called M-Code. Mr. Reaser was appointed by the Secretary of Commerce in January 2009 to the Commerce Spectrum Management Federal Advisory Committee as a Special Government Employee where he served for a decade. In 2015 he was selected by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to serve on a Congressionally-directed committee that provided scientific, technical and management recommendations regarding Commerce Department’s telecom labs.

Jeffrey H. Reed

Professor. Jeffrey H. Reed is the Willis G. Worcester Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. He currently serves as Founding Director of Wireless@Virginia Tech, one of the largest and most comprehensive university wireless research groups in the US, which he founded in 2006. In 2010, he founded the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology and served as its interim director. From 2019-2020 he served as the interim director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, and is the current CTO. Dr. Reed’s area of expertise is in software radios, smart antennas, wireless networks, and communications signal processing. He has received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S., all in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from the University of California, Davis (respectively 1987, 1980, and 1979). He has participated in various National Academies activities, including the GAO Broadband Study in 2016, the Engineering Review and Report on Telecommunications research in 2015, and the Engineering Review and Report on the Communications Technology Laboratory of the Department of Commerce in 2015, as well as serving on the technical advisory boards for approximately six companies and as an informal advisor on national policy regarding wireless issues.

Nambirajan Seshadri

Nambi Seshadri’s pioneering research and commercial intuitiveness have impacted multiple generations of mobile and wireless communications and have helped make technology more affordable for consumers. While at AT&T Shannon Labs, one of Seshadri’s key research initiatives was his work on transmission and coding techniques using multiple transmit antennas. This helped create a new field of wireless communications called space-time coding that improved the reliability of data transmission. An earlier version of this work that he did at AT&T Bell Labs, called delay diversity, was an important component of the 2G cellular time-division multiple access systems and has also impacted WiFi and LTE systems. His contributions to reliable transmission of compressed speech over mobile radio channels also influenced the development of 2G cellular systems. He also drove the adoption of adaptive modulation and hybrid automatic repeat request techniques (important for high performance in time varying channels) in to the Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) standards. These techniques have become core to robust transmission in 3G and 4G systems around the world. His work on list Viterbi decoding and applications for combined speech and channel decoding as well as data transmission systems have been applied to improve speech quality in 2G and 3G systems. Following his career at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Shannon Labs, Seshadri helped build Broadcom into a significant player in the wireless market. Here, he initiated or nurtured projects such as short-range wireless, WiFi modems in phones, cellular modems, GPS, near-field communications, and the multimedia chip set strategy that resulted in pioneering products such as the high-definition video camcorder and advanced megapixel camera phones. Through his leadership, the company was able to reduce prices while improving the performance of wireless chipsets. This system-on-chip integration of applications processing, graphics, haptics, WiFi, Bluetooth, camera, and 2G/3G/4G modems has impacted the industry by making smart phones much more affordable. An IEEE Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Seshadri is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA and consulting CTO at Quantenna Communications, San Jose, CA, USA, in addition to serving as an advisor for several startups.

J. Scott Stadler

J. Scott Stadler is the Head of the Communication Systems mission at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He directs a portfolio of programs spanning architecture definition, technology development, system prototypes, and testbeds that are advancing the capabilities of the nation’s communication networks. The Division focuses on military satellite communications, free-space laser communications, ground and air based tactical radios, spectrum operations, and the development of quantum technologies for communications. He has been involved in the design, development, and operation of a number of NASA and DoD satellite systems both at Lincoln Laboratory and in industry. This work included the early design and prototype of an architecture for supporting packetized network services via satellite. He has also led research efforts focused on the seamless integration of wireless and terrestrial packet data networks. He has served in a variety of technical management positions at Lincoln Laboratory and also served as Chief Engineer for the AF SMC/MCX through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act and as a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Stadler holds a BS degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MS degree from the University of Southern California, and a PhD degree from the University of Pennsylvania, all in electrical engineering.

Stephen J. Stafford

Stephen J. Stafford is the Chief Scientist of the GPS & GNSS Group at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL). He is a member of JHUAPL’s Principal Professional Staff, holding B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively. He has over 15 years of experience in PNT sensor fusion, and radio-navigation. This includes the development of several GPS receivers for high-accuracy and weak signal applications. He has several publications related to the field of navigation warfare.

Review of FCC Order 20-48 Authorizing Operation of a Terrestrial Radio Network Near the GPS Frequency Bands (January 13)

January 13, 2022

5:15 PM - 6:45 PM (EST)

Past

Agenda

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About

Agenda

1705 – 1815 ET Open Meeting Statement, Dr. J. Michael McQuade, committee chair

Remarks and Q&A with committee members, Representatives from Iridium

Note: The data gathering session of this meeting to be held Thursday, January 13, 2022, from 6:15 pm – 6:45 pm, EST, will not be open to the public under Subsection 15(b)(3) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C. App. The Academy has determined that to open this session to the public would disclose information described in 5 U.S.C. 552(b).

Additional Information

Is it a Closed Session event?

Partially Closed

The following committee members were present at the closed sessions of the event

Michael McQuade
Jennifer Alvarez
Kristine Larson
John Manferdelli
Preston Marshall
Mark Psiaki
Richard Reaser
Jeffrey Reed
Nambi Seshadri
Scott Stadler
Stephen Stafford
Jon Eisenberg
Ryan Murphy
Katiria Ortiz
Shenae Bradley

The following topics were discussed in the closed sessions:

In the first closed session, the committee discussed the project schedule and plan for future meetings and prepared for the open session. In the second closed committee session, the committee discussed the key themes and take-aways from the open data gathering sessions.

In the closed data gathering session, the committee heard a continuation of the presentation by Iridium. That session was not open to the public under Subsection 15(b)(3) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C. App. The Academy has determined that to open this session to the public would disclose information described in 5 U.S.C. 552(b).

Contact

Jon Eisenberg

jeisenbe@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

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Review of FCC Order 20-48 Authorizing Operation of a Terrestrial Radio Network Near the GPS Frequency Bands

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Review of FCC Order 20-48 Authorizing Operation of a Terrestrial Radio Network Near the GPS Frequency Bands

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Featured publication

Analysis of Potential Interference Issues Related to FCC Order 20-48

Description

Contributors

Committee

Sponsors

Staff

Parent projects

Computer Science and Telecommunications Board

Major units and sub-units

Contact

Contact us

Provide feedback

Request materials

More like this

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Health Care Financing to Improve Availability of Affordable Contraception: Identifying Promising Practices

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Earth Systems and Resources Program Area

Center for Advancing Science and Technology (CAST)

An English-Chinese Chinese-English Glossary of Cybersecurity Terms

Computing Research, Technologies, and Systems Program Area

AI, Automation, and the Future of Work: A Two-Part Webinar Series on Workforce Transformation