Does anyone want to check my math on this, because these numbers are kind of amazing to me.
In my post above to
@MacBH928, I was going through the power differences between WiFi and 5G and I pulled some numbers from the
Report and Order:
3280 Watts/MHz in rural areas
1640 Watts/MHz everywhere else
That seemed crazy high to me. So I started looking around the web and eventually found an
earlier letter AT&T and Verizon sent to the FCC offering to reduce their transmit power levels as a concession to the FAA. Their concession, for 6 months, was to reduce their transmission power to 62dBm/MHz up to the horizon with a taper function above the horizon. They offer further reductions within 1000 feet of the runway.
But I started doing the math— the
reduced power level they’ve agreed to is:
10^((62-30)/10)= 1585 Watts/MHz
That’s 444kW of output power assuming they use the full 280MHz of bandwidth in the 3.7-3.98GHz bandwidth they’re licensed for. 158kW if they limit transmission to below 3.8GHz. Am I doing that math right?
I know these are EIRP numbers, but I’m not interested in the conducted power to the antenna, I’m thinking about the power seen by anything in the antenna pattern.
That’s more than most FM radio stations. If they go to full power after the 6mo window, it will be significantly more than any FM radio station.
WBCT transmits at 320kW ERP, which is 525kW EIRP.
@827538 had been making a big deal over the fact that there’s currently a satellite band next to the altimeter radars. That seemed like a particularly weak argument to me, because this band is for downlinks from solar powered geostationary satellites 36,000,000 meters above the equator and the 5G towers are only agreeing to keep their terrestrial transmitters 1000m away for the next 6mos.
That November letter also agrees to temporarily limit their power flux density over airports to -30dBW/m^2/MHz so now I’ve got numbers to validate my assumption with.
Part 25.208 limits power flux density at the earth to -142dBW/m^2 in a 4kHz bandwidth or less depending on elevation.
Again if I’m doing my math right:
C-Band 5G is about 1 x 10^-3 W per square meter per MHz
FSS downlink is about 6.3 x 10^-15 W per m^2 per 4kHz
or 1.6 x 10^-12 W per m^2 per MHz
So the temporarily reduced power levels look to be
634 million times higher than what the limits were when the radar was designed. When the restrictions are removed, the numbers will be well over a factor of a billion.