jon-
Maybe the question re who obtained the frequencies should be put to Hoss - he crossed some palms with silver to make it happen. Better question is how much did it cost, and haow many time over do we have to repay it. My understanding is that the cost was about $10K, or about 0.2% of what AMA has taken in each year since.
Before AMA 'got our frequencies,' we flew on citizens band, and before that we flew on the ham bands, an option that is still open to us. There is a one-time fee and a test that will require a couple of hours study time for someone with an IQ over 100 and no prior need to be familiar with FCC rules.
Spread spectrum radios operate across a broad band of frequencies, hopping the signal, usually pseudorandomly, around the fixed narrowband frequency slots within that signalling bandwidth. Each bit of signal intelligence is repeated multiple times (each repeat referred to as a chip), and detecting bit present or not is a statistical decision making process. Some chips are lost due to noise in the channel, but only enough chips need to get through to cause a statistical bias leading to the bit present or not decision of the detector. The more chips transmitted to represent each bit, the better the effective signal to noise ratio. The trade-off is that more chip redundancy requires low data rate or high bandwidth consumption, or both. At any rate, even though spread spectrum systems can operate at very low power levels (small s/n ratio), they still require bandwidth that is regulated by FCC, and the cost of bandwidth is dear. As for using the existing allocation to R/C for spread spectrum, not likely. The band is not very wide (relatively speaking - my bread-and-butter thing involves a spread spectrum satcom system that has 2 GHz of BW to work with), and is sandwiched between a couple of VHF television channels.

Abe