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.
News
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...
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...
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
-
Stephen D. Voran and Jaden Pieper, “Frequency-Domain Signal-to-Noise Ratios Illuminate the Effects of the Spectral Consistency Constraint and Griffin-Lim Algorithms,” Conference Paper, October 2025
The restoration of degraded audio signals is often performed on complex-valued frequency-domain (FD) representations. This requires manipulation of either magnitudes and phases or real and imaginary parts. In general, these manipulations do not prod...
-
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 ...
This Month in ITS History
February 2012: FirstNet Established
On February 22, 2012, the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 was signed into law. It included a section on Public Safety Communications and Electromagnetic Spectrum Auctions (Title VI of Public Law 112–96, codified at 47 U.S.C. §1401 ff.) which established the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) as an independent authority within the NTIA, directed the FCC to license the 700 MHz D block exc...