ITS: The Nation’s Spectrum and Communications Lab

Our mission is to ADVANCE innovation in communications technologies, INFORM spectrum and communications policy for the benefit of all stakeholders, and INVESTIGATE our Nation’s most pressing telecommunications challenges through research that employees are proud to deliver. 

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Graphic with link to Fiscal Year 2023 ITS Technical Progress Report

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News

Lessons Learned from ITS Open RAN System Integration: A Resource for Engineers, System Integrators, and Stakeholders Aiming to Deploy Open RAN Systems

November 26, 2025

The key to successful Open RAN deployments — the ability of subsystems from different vendors to seamlessly interoperate — is also the greatest challenge.

Commercial Tier 1 radio access networks (RANs) deployed today...

NTIA Radio Engineers Complete First HF Radio Noise Characterization Study at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, in More Than 25 Years

February 25, 2025

Adam Hicks (l.) and Robert Achatz (r.) prepare to leave for McMurdo Station. (Photo credit: USAP)

In December 2024, ITS electronics engineers Robert Achatz and Adam Hicks travelled from ITS’s Boulder laboratory...

ITS Open Source Software Advances Training No-reference (NR) Speech Quality Estimators with Independent Datasets

January 6, 2025

To make the most efficient use of available bandwidth, how much can speech and video be compressed before the end user perceives them as degraded? ITS’s...

Recent Publications

  • Nicholas DeMinco, Paul M. McKenna, and Robert Johnk, “A Comparative Analysis of Multiple Knife-Edge Diffraction Methods,” Technical Report NTIA TR 26-580, October 2025

    The results of a thorough comparative analysis of alternative graphical prediction methods for multiple knife-edge diffraction are presented and compared to the method developed by Vogler. The Vogler multiple knife-edge diffraction loss is rigorous ...

  • Margaret H. Pinson, Lucjan Janowski, and Mark D. Gross, “Reasons to Replace Term Ecological Validity with Terms Mundane Realism and External Validity,” Conference Paper, October 2025

    The term ecological validity is widely used across IEEE publications, but its definition and application remain inconsistent and ambiguous. This paper explores how conflicting definitions of ecological validity lead to confusion about exper-imental ...

Ethel C. Marden and Robert D. Elbourn operating SEAC

This Month in ITS History

December 1941: FCC Suspends All Amateur Radio Use During Wartime

On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, decimating the U.S. Pacific fleet. This act brought the United States into World War II. For many, it was a day that the world changed forever. The National Bureau of Standards Radio Section changed forever, too. The day after Pearl Harbor was attacked...

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