Ofcom- as my old mum might have said-
"Neither use nor bloody ornament."
Come the end of 2012, the Programme Makers and Special Events (PMSE) industry won't be restricted to spectrum white spaces in using their wireless microphones; Ofcom reckons wireless mikes and television signals can happily share the same frequencies. The belief, laid out in the regulator's latest statement (19-page PDF/233KB …
That sounds good until you read the rest of it :
"Ofcom reckons wireless microphones can happily use the whole range of digital television frequencies without preventing anyone from watching Dr Who."
Which is a bit like saying "you can whisper in a pop concert without preventing others from hearing the performance". Yes, certainly. But there's no guarantee that the person you are whispering to will understand what you are saying. Ofcom would have to allow the radio equivalent of "shouting" to stand any chance of being "heard".
Yes, the aerials may be 10m from the ground, far enough for little of the wireless mike signal not to reach the TV aerial -- but the converse isn't necessarily true. You have around 0.02 watts competing with umpteen megawatts -- only a very small fraction of a percent of which has to reach the ground to blot out a radio mike working on the same frequency.
Irish Regulators (of any kind, as any fule noes) are worse.
"and assumes that wireless microphones won't go outdoors and that all TV aerials are more than 10 metres from the ground."
There are so many things wrong I don't know where to start.
But then they think so called "ethernet" power plugs are OK (In reality wide band transmitters).
They gave up on protecting licensed users of spectrum ages ago.
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"is based on testing that Ofcom has been doing since 1998, and assumes that wireless microphones won't go outdoors and that all TV aerials are more than 10 metres from the ground"
Well since the former is obviously nonsense and the latter ignores such things as internal aerials, bungalows, wall mounted aerials and loft mounted aerials the whole thing is pointless. So the questions are (1) who decided to do all this work based on a false premise? and (2) have they been made to pay for the whole damn thing out of their own pocket?