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
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Jaden Pieper and Stephen D. Voran, “Analysis of Multiple Noisy Measurements and their Resamplings via Expected Values of Correlation and Mean-Squared-Error,” Technical Memorandum NTIA TM-26-581, March 2026
This memorandum provides mathematical relationships for agreement between true measurand values, means of multiple imperfect measurements, and resampled measurement means. Agreement is quantified here in terms of Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC...
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Jaden Pieper and Stephen D. Voran, “Unseen but not Unknown: Using Dataset Concealment to Robustly Evaluate Speech Quality Estimation Models,” Conference Paper, February 2026
We introduce Dataset Concealment (DSC), a rigorous new procedure for evaluating and interpreting objective speech quality estimation models. DSC quantifies and decomposes the performance gap between research results and real-world application requir...
This Month in ITS History
May 1946: CRPL Established as a Peacetime Equivalent to IRPL
On May 1, 1946 the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL) was officially created. During World War II the military had taken control of the airwaves, and with them the radio research arm of the National Bureau of Standards. In 1942, the Interdepartmental Radio Propagation Laboratory (IRPL) had been formed from the...