RF surveys

[Mike O'Dell]

Dennis Roberson at Illinois Institute of Technology 
in Chicago has mounted a number of "spectrum observatories"
which do continuous real-time surveys of large blocks
of spectrum. There are many assertions about how much
which parts of the spectrum are used and where, but there
has been little objective information available.

Dennis was CTO at MOTOROLA before Ed Zander showed up,
and he is also the longest serving member of the FCC
technical advisory board.

Anyway, as you might imagine, the first observatories used
a lot of very expensive lab-quality equipment, but he has
been on the forefront of taking advantage of the plummetting
price of SDR-style receiver technology. 

He owes me some URLs to their papers which I'll forward
when he coughts them up - and this gives me a reason to ping him.

     -mo