What We Do
The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) is the Nation's spectrum and communications lab. Our mission is to ADVANCE innovation in communications technologies, INFORM spectrum and communications policy for the benefit of all stakeholders, and INVESTIGATE our Nation’s most pressing telecommunications challenges through research that employees are proud to deliver. Learn more about ITS on our YouTube Channel or read about our research programs in the Technical Progress Report.
Registration is now open for the fully virtual ISART 2020! Check
out the updated Agenda for the 2020 International
Symposium...
The Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary (OPEN) Government
Data Act, signed into law on January 14, 2019, requires federal
agencies to publish their information online as open data, using
standardized, machine-readable data formats. In addition,...
May 9, 2019
ITS has a long history of leadership in air-to-ground
propagation model development within the International
Telecommunications Union – Radiocommunication Sector’s (ITU-R)
Study Group 3 – Radiowave Propagation (and its...
March 10, 2019
How can we get more use out of the radio spectrum? One way is by
sharing radio bands between users who have never shared before.
Consider radio frequencies near 3.5 GHz. Until recently, that part
of the spectrum was...
November 26, 2018
Behind every initiative to share spectrum are models of
how radio waves in a particular band propagate through different
environments. How far will a signal travel before it becomes too
faint to be useful or...
New Publications
This Month in ITS History
September 1962: Canadian Satellite Allouette Launched from Point Aguella, CA
On September 29, 1962, the world’s first top-side ionospheric sounding satellite was launched from Point Aguella Missile Range in California. Top-side sounding allows researchers to probe the ionosphere from above, in much the same way that researchers have explored it from the ground, using reflected radio waves. These readings improve ionospheric maps, which are essential for radio communications, and help scientists understand the charged layers of the atmosphere that reflect and scatter radio waves. Allouette (French for lark) was constructed at Canada’s Defence and Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) by a team headed by scientist John Chapman. DRTE joined with the UK’s Radio and Space Research Station, NASA, and the Central Radio Propagation Lab (CRPL) in the International Satellites for Ionospheric Sounding program in 1959. The cooperative research group had already launched two American rockets equipped with fixed frequency transmitters to probe the ionosphere as they passed through during their 13 minute flights. Allouette, which was launched on a two stage Thor-Agena rocket and placed into a 1000 km, circular orbit remained in space for 10 years, and sent over one million images back to earth. The satellite passed over CRPL’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado weekly. CRPL’s analysis of Allouette’s data was instrumental in understanding Spread F, the scattering of radio waves by moving plasma within the ionosphere. ITS’s current research into radio propagation and spectrum utilization relies heavily on data obtained from Allouette and similar projects from the 1960s.