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.
News
October 1, 2021
Video streaming is a highly competitive market that dominates internet traffic. Video consumes 65% of worldwide mobile downstream traffic....
September 16, 2021
The Video Quality Research Program has launched an interactive web demo of ITS-developed software that estimates the quality of...
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 ISART...
Recent Publications
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NTIA Special Publication SP-22-560: 5G In-Air Field Strength Measurements for Radar Altimeter Research March 2022, Frank H. Sanders; Kenneth Tilley; Geoffrey A. Sanders. This brief video provides an overview of ITS's approach to taking RF measurements to provide data relevant to the topic of radio interference that might possibly occur from some U.S. 5G transmitters t...
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NTIA Technical Report TR-22-557: Tropospheric Scatter: Theory vs. Predictive Models February 2022, Roger A. Dalke. Circa 1960, the National Bureau of Standards intensively studied over-the-horizon radio propagation due to tropospheric (aka forward) scatter. The results of that effort, published in the form of grap...
This Month in ITS History
May 1946: CRPL Established as a Peacetime Equivalent to IRPL
On May 1, 1946 the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL) was officially created. During World War II the military had taken control of the airwaves, and with them the radio research arm of the National Bureau of Standards. In 1942, the Interdepartmental Radio Propagation Laboratory (IRPL) had been formed from the Bureau’s radio lab, but its research was supervised and funded by the Army and Navy. With the horrors of World War II over the generals were ready to give the responsibility for radio research back to the Department of Commerce. In December of 1945, the Secretaries of War, the Army and Navy had written a letter to the Secretary of Commerce suggesting a centralized agency to ha ...