IMPASSE REMAINS ON REDUCING FSS DISH SIZE AT WRC

The U.S. position still is for “no change,” a delegation spokesman said. Australian, Canadian, Israeli, New Zealand and U.S. officials said they couldn’t agree to a protective power limit below -115.5 dB. But Europeans said they wouldn’t budge from a somewhat less restrictive number.

The gridlock lingers beyond the halfway point of the WRC, which began June 9 and ends July 4. Meens, of France’s Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), said Mon.’s meeting marked the last for that working group. That means disputes over provisions such as protective power limits are bumped to hallway conversations and the full committee on allocations, which is to meet today (Tues.). Officials of the Conference of European Postal & Telecom (CEPT) Administrations and several African countries voiced support for a protective power limit closer to -113 dB. A delegate from Tonga suggested an acceptable range of -111 dB to -113 dB. “A compromise is one in which both sides share a burden,” the Defense Dept.’s Jerry Conner told the group. “The values being proposed by Tonga represent more than just a sharing of the hurt. They represent a degradation of the radiolocation service. The U.S. can’t accept a value below - 115.5 dB.”

While Meens told the group he had heard “rumors in the corridor” about a possible compromise, he had yet to see a specific proposal from an administration. The U.S. position, backed by the Inter-American Telecom Commission (CITEL), has been for “no change” in that band, which would preserve the current limit of 4.5 m on FSS earth stations to protect military radars. A CEPT proposal supports a way to allow those FSS earth stations to be reduced to 1.2 m to allow broader deployment of commercial broadband applications. Companies such as PanAmSat and SES Americom have expressed an interest in such applications. The European proposal embraces one of the methods for limiting interference in a Conference Preparatory Meeting (CPM) report, Method B, which would allow VSAT deployment and add technical conditions to manage interference into radiolocation and space research stations. That would require that before an administration brought an earth station in a geostationary FSS network into service with an antenna smaller than 4.5 m, it would have to make sure the power radiated didn’t exceed -113 dB toward coastal areas and certain border areas. The U.S. stands by Method A of the CPM report, which is for no change.

“There hasn’t been any official change or movement away from our Method A position on the dish size at this point,” a delegation spokesman said. Referring to the working group debate on possible other values, the spokesman described them as “technical discussions of what potential figures could be used… We didn’t agree to anything that had been proposed. We haven’t technically shifted from where we were in previous days.”

Much of the back-and-forth Mon. involved how to share the burden between FSS and radiolocation systems if VSATs were deployed. “This sharing situation is not easy,” Canada’s Vassilios Mimis said: “To find a solution, there are some sacrifices to be made. Those sacrifices would have to be made by both systems.” Mimis reiterated that Canada backed the CITEL position of “no change.” He said an agreement to allow smaller dishes with power limits of -115.5 dB could correspond to a degradation in radar range of up to 14%. “This is a significant number and that amount of degradation will cause some pain on the radar operations, probably the operators and maybe even the system designers,” Mimis said. “We have to do a lot of work to mitigate the effects of that loss.” An Australian delegate also said his administration backed the U.S. position, having entered the conference agreeing to examine -120 dB as a possible power limit. He said his govt. “came to the conclusion that a 15% degradation in radar range is a significant compromise. We went to our bottom line in a spirit of compromise to try to get other administrations to be sympathetic,” he said, referring to the -115.5 dB figure: “We have significantly compromised our positions and we would not be able to go below that value.”

Delegates couldn’t agree on a proposal for a range of power limits to be considered at the next WRC level. French delegate Jean Chartier reminded the working group that 30 CEPT members had agreed to -113 dB and all had an interest in both FSS and radiolocation services. “To reply to Canada, who says that our position lacks flexibility, it’s not that it’s so rigid and inflexible,” Chartier said: “It’s a reality and the result of a compromise that was achieved between 30 CPT countries.”

Francois Rancy, CEPT coordinator for the WRC, objected to some characterizations that agreement was coalescing around the more restrictive value of -115.5 dB. He noted 30 CEPT administrations as well as 5 administrations of the Regional Commonwealth in Communications (RCC) supported the - 113 dB limit. The -115.5 dB figure corresponds to a loss of 12-14% in radar range when vessels were using territorial waters, he said. “In terms of the utilization space, the ship could use the entire space but the FSS earth stations would have to operate very far from the borders,” Rancy said.

But the U.S.’s Conner disagreed with this characterization of land that would be excluded from VSAT deployment. “We will not be able to go anywhere we want to with our ships. We will have to suffer.” Among the compromises under discussion in the working group is a reduction from a current dish size of 4.5 m down to 1.2 m, as well as allowing new 4.5 m to operate in the band without restriction, he said. A -115.5 dB power limit would mean another compromise in the form of a 15% range reduction for radars, he said.

Several Arab delegates declined to commit to any potential compromise. United Arab Emirates delegate Mohamed Al Ghanim said his administration was part of a proposal at the start of the conference that backed a limit of -105 dB. While the group of Arab states is considering a compromise, he didn’t elaborate to the working group, saying only that it looked “forward to having a single value by the end of this conference.”