FWCC Asks for Reconsideration of Higher Ground Earth Station Authorizations

Higher Ground's plans to deploy up to 50,000 mobile satellite earth stations is raising considerable threats of adjacent channel interference to nearly 58,000 fixed service point-to-point microwave links already being operated, the Fixed Wireless Communications Coalition said in an FCC application for review to have been posted Friday. FWCC simultaneously also filed a motion for a stay of the authorization Higher Ground received in January for the C-band deployments. FWCC said the Higher Ground waiver requires it prevent harmful interference to fixed service (FS) operations, but the company "failed to show it can carry this burden" and hasnt released details of how its system operates or give any proof it has been tested in real-world conditions. The group said the requirement Higher Ground keep logs for purposes of confirming or denying it caused interference on an occasion is useless since an FS operator couldn't tell the source of a service interruption and it does nothing to prevent or predict a recurrence. In its application for review to be posted Friday, FWCC said a Higher Ground representative last year at a frequency coordination committee meeting admitted the company won't provide protection against adjacent channel interference, and that company's subsequent assurance it would comply with applicable out-of-band emission limits "was an evasion, a technical play on words" since it addresses a different problem of a transmitter tuned to one channel that improperly puts a signal into a different one.