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.
News
November 26, 2025
The key to successful Open RAN deployments — the ability of subsystems from different vendors to seamlessly interoperate — is also the greatest challenge.
Commercial Tier 1 radio access networks (RANs) deployed today...
February 25, 2025
Adam Hicks (l.) and Robert Achatz (r.) prepare to leave for McMurdo Station. (Photo credit: USAP)
In December 2024, ITS electronics engineers Robert Achatz and Adam Hicks travelled from ITS’s Boulder laboratory...
January 6, 2025
To make the most efficient use of available bandwidth, how much can speech and video be compressed before the end user perceives them as degraded? ITS’s Audio Quality...
Recent Publications
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Max Hollingsworth et al., “Repurposing Cellular Reference Signals: Accurate RSRP Measurements with Mobile Phones,” Conference Paper, March 2026
Reference signals in both LTE and 5G cellular networks present an untapped and abundant signal of oppor-tunity for high quality radio frequency (RF) propagation measurements. Commercial-off-the-shelf mobile phones continuously capture and report Ref...
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Jaden Pieper and Stephen D. Voran, “Analysis of Multiple Noisy Measurements and their Resamplings via Expected Values of Correlation and Mean-Squared-Error,” Technical Memorandum NTIA TM-26-581, March 2026
This memorandum provides mathematical relationships for agreement between true measurand values, means of multiple imperfect measurements, and resampled measurement means. Agreement is quantified here in terms of Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC...
This Month in ITS History
April 1950: Boulder Chamber of Commerce Begins Fundraising to Attract CRPL
On April 11, 1950, the citizens of the city of Boulder, Colorado kicked off a campaign to raise money to guarantee the Department of Commerce’s new laboratory would be built in the city. With the help of Senator Ed Johnson (D-CO) and Ed Condon, the director of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), Boulder had been ch...