On Oct. 20, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee approved legislation with April 7, 2009, as the deadline (for phasing out analog TV broadcasts).

The House Energy and Commerce Committee late Wednesday approved legislation setting Dec. 31, 2008, as the date that broadcasters must switch to DTV (digital television) broadcasts, in order transfer the upper 700MHz radio frequency spectrum to emergency response agencies and commercial wireless vendors.

Somewhere inbetween, the frequencies will be available. But most likely not to fly models, since the government expect to sell them for a great deal of money. Auctions of the spectrum vacated by broadcasters is projected to raise at least US$10 billion.

As it is, we have exclusive use of the frequencies on 72 Mhz, wedged between other users that are only 10 kHz from each of our frequencies. A slightly more difficult receiver design than the old 80 kHz systems, but the results have been good the past 15 years.

What has not been discussed yet on this thread is the need of more bandwidth to improve the data rate and resolution that an RC system can provide. Current FCC regs require our transmitters to only use 8 kHz of bandwidth. For pulse width coded systems this limits the rise and fall times of the signal. So the receiver is burden with resolving when a pulse is turned on and off with less than crisp waveforms. For PCM systems it limits either the resolution and/or the data refresh rate.

So with a wideband system, we can send a lot more data to provide more resolution and higher updates rates. I noticed that Spektrum car radios are 4096 PCM which is twice the resolution of the 14 MZ Futaba and 4 times what a typical high end radio uses.