A group of petitioners continues to seek authorization of high-frequency financial data trading in the shortwave radio bands.
The Shortwave Modernization Coalition (SMC) desires long-distance non-voice communications between 2–25 MHz to be fully authorized under the existing Part 90 FCC rules.
The proposed Part 90 authorization differs from traditional international HF broadcasts, governed under the Part 73 rules.
Those rules were utilized last year by three firms with ties to financial trading to obtain station grants; however, the FCC restricted those stations to broadcast operations, likely prompting trading firms to view the pending Part 90 petition as their only remaining path to secure spectrum for dedicated non-voice data.
The SMC’s petition has been pending since 2023, and, based on the tenor of its latest FCC filing, it is growing anxious for some sort of answer from the commission.
(Read the SMC’s cost-benefit analysis filed in December with the FCC.)
“A radio engineer from the 1920s could take a shortwave radio from the 1920s and transmit and receive voice signals today,” the SMC wrote in a cost-benefit analysis filed to the FCC after a December meeting with the commission. “It is remarkable how little innovation has occurred in this band.”
Full-time usage
The coalition is made up of seven financial trading firms that ensure there is always a buyer or seller available for stocks and other financial products.
Right now, SMC member experimental HF transmissions operate under Part 5 of the commission’s rules. The licensees “are not permitted to provide commercial service, charge fees or receive payments for products or services of operation.”
But seeking permanency, the coalition said that its members and the U.S. public have benefitted “substantially” from non-voice communications in the shortwave band over the last decade.
“Absent communications in the 2–25 MHz band, the SMC members would lose what has been demonstrated to be an extremely efficient and beneficial method of delivering data over long distances,” the coalition wrote in its December filing.
Granting Part 90 non-voice licenses would simply allow current experimental licensees to continue their operations that have existed without formal complaints of interference, it said.
Moreover, the coalition believes the HF band should be brought into the current practice of spectrum regulation, with the “flexible use” approach that the FCC has used to manage other bands.
New technology through software-defined systems, the coalition said, has been engineered to find open channels without impacting existing spectrum users.
“This vital feature of how the band has been utilized means that any harmful interference with active federal users should not be a concern,” the coalition wrote.
Of course, not all current users of the shortwave spectrum agree with that assertion.
Interference and noise
The open FCC petition from 2023 includes approximately 900 comments, many of which are from radio amateurs seeking to deny the SMC petition, the National Association for Amateur Radio (ARRL), as well as the U.S. Coast Guard.
Nine Part 90 bands are immediately adjacent or overlap amateur bands.
The Coast Guard, meanwhile, worries that the overall noise floor in the 2–25 MHz band will increase due to increased usage in the band.
But the SMC argued that there have been a “relatively small number of firms” seeking such licenses. It also argued that if noise were a problem, comments would have been filed against existing experimental license users, which the SMC said has not happened.
“Many of the commenters appear simply to be unaware that non-voice communications have been in place for many years without complaints about an increase in the noise floor,” it wrote.
Several of these stations, as Radio World reported, were exempted from station ID requirements until mid-December, when the FCC revoked the exemptions.
In the ARRL’s opposition document, which was filed in August 2023, the association argued that it would not be possible to identify Part 90 stations responsible for interference without periodic station identification “using an open and known protocol” required for that purpose.
The International Amateur Radio Union’s Monitoring System, which monitors the amateur bands to identify transmissions sent by “intruders,” captured what it believed to be high-frequency trading in 2024, occurring in a portion of the 20-meter amateur radio band from 14347.5–14350 kHz.
The OfficialSWLchannel on YouTube captured what is believed to be a financial trading signal last January:
The ARRL also noted that experimental transmissions occurred at “unknown times” and changing frequencies, making interference sources difficult to track down.
The SMC’s petition also seeks a power increase for Part 90 operations in the 2–25 MHz band, resulting in a maximum transmitter power of 20 kW. SMC pointed to 10Band LLC’s use of 20 kW, authorized for experimental usage, and a study conducted by Roberson and Associates affirming its belief that the power levels will not cause harmful interference.
But the ARRL noted that compared to the current authorization of 1,000 watts peak envelope power for the Part 90 operations that do exist in the HF bands, that constitutes an increase of at least 13 dB, creating a much greater potential for interference.
The ARRL also believed that the SMC’s analysis was flawed by considering only ionospheric propagation and not groundwave interference, and using noise floor baselines that consider only residential noise levels, ignoring the lower noise floors of rural environments.
FCC meeting
SMC consultants Dennis Roberson and former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth met with members of the commission’s Office of Engineering and Technology and Office of International Affairs on Dec. 5.
In its meeting with the commission, the SMC also discussed how the proposal would work with respect to international settings. It suggested that the service would function under the commission’s Part 2 rules. Those rules include stipulations that if there is a complaint of harmful interference from a foreign source, the U.S.-licensed user must stop operating on the associated frequency.
Their equipment must also be able to transmit and receive on any assigned frequency in the band and be capable of immediately changing frequency.
SMC member companies stated their experimental stations have already been operating in such a manner.
Petitions like the SMC’s, as Bennett Kobb explained in Experimental Radio News, can often sit inactive for years. The coalition believes that the commission’s inaction “is ultimately a form of denial of the petition.”
SMC argued that the temporary nature of experimental licenses will dissuade its members from further investing in shortwave data communications.
Ultimately, the SMC seeks the grant of its petition and initiation of a rulemaking process.
[Do you receive the Radio World SmartBrief newsletter each weekday morning? We invite you to sign up here.]
