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.

ISART 2020 Presentations Available Now

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 ...

ITS Releases Open Metadata Extensions for Sharing and Reusing RF Measurement Data

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...

ITS Open Sources P.528 Software Implementation

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...

Expanding Spectrum Use: Detecting and Avoiding Radar Signals

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...

Measurement Best Practices

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

Conference Paper : Full-Reference and No-Reference Objective Evaluation of Deep Neural Network Speech June 2021, Stephen D. Voran. Objective speech quality and intelligibility estimators do not correctly assess speech generated by deep neural networks (DNNs). We use 256 speech files and subjective scores that cover 14 DNN speech ...
Conference Paper : Measuring Speech Quality of System Input while Observing only System Output June 2021, Stephen D. Voran. We present a set of relatively small-scale proof-of-concept experiments where we construct no-reference (NR) speech quality estimators that give reliable values of system-under-test (SUT) input speech...

This Month in ITS History

June 1910: Congress Passes First American Radio Law

On June 28, 1910, Congress passed the Wireless Ship Act (PL 262, 61^st Congress). The legislation was prompted by the 1909 wreck of the SS Republic. When the Republic sank, a radio distress call saved 1,200 lives. This law was first in the U.S to regulate radio and applied only to ships carrying 60 or more passengers and traveling 200 miles. The act required these ships to carry a radio, and a skilled radio operator. Radio was still a cutting edge invention in 1910, but the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in the Commerce Department (DOC) was already investigating its uses. The DOC was given authority to enforce the new law, and NBS increased its radio work in preparation for the Wireless Act effective date of June 1, 1911. In 1912, the Titanic sank, bringing additional attention to the lifesaving role of radio at sea. In 1913 NBS began to hire radio researchers in its Electrical Division and initiated work on fog beacons for ships. By 1916, radio work was so important that Congress created the NBS radio lab. From these beginnings, radio research in the Department of Commerce continues to this day. ITS is now a primary federal radio research laboratory, developing and assessing new telecommunications technologies to assist NTIA in its role as the agency principally responsible for advising the President on telecommunications and information policy issues.