Highflight

My Feedback: (4)

I thought you wanted to have a real discussion about the issue, but I realize now that you just wanted to play "one upmanship" word games. At that, you succeeded.
I also thought you wanted to discuss a "dual band" R/C system but I guess that's been resolved in your mind (with my help) in favor of a different system known as... Spread Spectrum and Broadband have already been discussed at length with regard to R/C use. While it is promising, there are still some issues that have to be addressed before we can safely, reliably and uniformly use that technology for R/C use. Never forget that safely, reliably and uniformly are not just goals, but requirements, for R/C use.

It's not hard at all to set up one radio for SS/BB use. It's another thing altogether to move an entire industry to that technology.
Cell phone use is propagating at a horrific rate and we (R/C industry) are not considered by the FCC to be a very important RF using group. To be safe, we would very likely want a small portion of a band given to our sole use but that is not at all likely in today's regulatory environment.
By the way, do you know ANYBODY with a cell phone who has never had a dropped call? You might say that dropped calls are a result of transmission considerations which we wouldn't have because of direct-direct TX and RX. But we still have thousands of transmission towers spreading millions of transmission all over the landscape that could easily affect us... care to enjoy a "dropped" call to your aircraft? (Instead of "I ain't got it", you'd get to shout: "Is anybody there.. hello... hellOOOO!")
Since the R/C hobby pretty much "owns" our portion of the 72mhz band (not really, but for practical purposes, we do), the FCC doesn't have much incentive to give us more RF bandwidth. The only hope for that "might" be that they woul like to take our portion of the 72mhz band away from us and give it to others and giving us another band might allow that, but that could backfire on us if we didn't pay attention.

Having said that, it would be absolutely great if SS/BB could be safely, reliably and uniformly used for R/C because then, "frequency flags" would be just as obsolete as escapements are now, and club managed flying sites would become obsolete as well because with no frequency interference concern, we could all go fly anywhere we can find an open field. In fact, R/C clubs themselves would just disappear in favor of unorganized, small groups of friends who would simply get together at any empty field. This would be inevitable because the main reason for joining an R/C club is for flying under safe frequency management.

Then the AMA would become bankrupt because since AMA membership is MANDATED by every R/C club in the country, but clubs would quickly lose relevance (and members) so, insurance or not, many people would rather not spend the $55 "for nothing" every year when they could buy a whole bunch of glow fuel instead. Then without the AMA to protect members interests, the government could finally outlaw all R/C flying activity as soon as the first tragic death occured involving a child.. or two.

It's kind of like looking at political issues where a bunch of people are ready to jump on a new piece of legislation but no one wants to follow (think) the legislation through to it's logical conclusion and impact... which leads to MORE legislation to fix the problems caused by the original legislation.
While my descriptive imagination might seem "out there", I have seen too many weird thing happen in my lifetime to make any assumptions. There's a reason why our parents usually cautioned us to "go slow".

Highflight