ITS: 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.
August 18, 2020
Presentations from the ISART 2020, the International
Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies: 5G Spectrum and a
Zero-Trust Network are now available on the ...
April 2, 2020
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...
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
November 1920: First Scheduled Commercial Radio Broadcast
On November 2, 1920 Frank Conrad broadcast the election results from the Harding-Cox election (Harding won 37 of 48 states). Conrad was a ham radio operator who worked with radio manufacturer Westinghouse to set up KDKA in Pittsburgh. It was the first of its kind, but it echoed the successes of the National Bureau of Standards (BS) WWV station which had begun occasional experimental broadcasts in May. KDKA’s broadcast was a success, and soon radio stations were popping up all around the country. The NBS Radio Section supported the booming industry. Radio Section researchers tested materials for radio parts, and antenna shapes. At the request of broadcasters, they created standards for radio and equipment to measure those standards. They published technical manuals and acted as an information clearinghouse for companies and individuals. To help consumers listen to the broadcasts, NBS created the porta-phone, a small portable radio in 1921. In 1922, NBS printed instructions for creating a homemade radio at one tenth the cost of a commercial one. Before the creation of the Federal Radio Commission (the precursor to the FCC), the Radio Section even tested radio operators. Today, ITS, the Radio Section’s descendant, continues to work to improve current and emerging communications technologies such as LTE, Voice over LTE (VoLTE), and 5G.