How Intelligent Engineering Can Solve the Electromagnetic Spectrum Crisis

Andrew McDermott (0:00)

Welcome to ID The Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at mindmatters.ai.

Robert J. Marks (0:24)

Greetings and welcome to Mind Matters News. I'm your load pulling host, Robert J. Marks. You don't know what that means, but you will in a little bit. Have you ever thought about all of the electromagnetic waves in your room where you're sitting right now? You have invisible microwave cell phone signals in the air, some of them going through your body. Plus the signals for broadcast television and AM radio and FM radio.

Even radiation from a GPS signal is there in the room with you, waiting for you to tap in. A radar also uses electromagnetic waves.

The only thing that changes from electromagnetic wave to electromagnetic wave is the frequency. How many times does the signal wiggle every second? Even the visible light you see is an electromagnetic wave that oscillates at trillions of cycles or wiggles per second. The range of frequencies makes up the so-called electromagnetic spectrum, and managing the electromagnetic spectrum is what our topic is going to be today. We have some really great guests. Dr. Charles Baylis is a professor at Baylor University and director of Smart Hub. That's a 15-university research center focused on making more effective use of the wireless spectrum. He is really a world-renowned spectrum expert who has given even congressional testimony on the topic. We also have Dr. Austin Egbert, no stranger to Mind Matters News. He works with Dr. Baylis and Smart Hub. He also holds a professor title at Baylor University. And Jonathan Swindell, who's a PhD candidate at Baylor University. And for full disclosure, I work with these guys in my day job, and it's a joy to work with them and talk with them today. So welcome, everybody.

Let's go ahead and start with Charlie. We talked about and wrote about, we did we did an article for Newsmax on the spectrum crisis and why somebody should care about the spectrum crisis. If you have a cell phone, should you be concerned about the spectrum crisis? What's going on here? And why is it a crisis?

Charles Baylis (2:35)

Well, the reason there and by the way, thank you for having me on the podcast. Dr. Marks, appreciate this opportunity. The reason we should be concerned about it is we're actually running out of frequencies to use.

So every application, a cell phone, a radar, even passive scientific systems that are used to observe the atmosphere for weather and look at the stars, all of them have to use certain frequencies. And we're having so many applications arise in wireless now that we're running out of frequencies. Just, you know, think back to when I was born in 1979 No one had personal wireless devices back then. And now I do polls in my classes, and some of these students are coming in with four or five wireless devices on them at one time. And every one of the enormous growth of wireless devices, every one of those devices has to use a frequency. So we're running out of frequencies. And really, the crisis is that we haven't been able to find a way to get around this problem.

I really believe that the solution to this problem is technical innovation. We have to find ways to adaptively share the spectrum. But, you know, what a lot of people have tried to do for years is to regulate the problem away. And that just isn't going to be able to solve it.

Robert J. Marks (3:55)

You mentioned a couple of interesting things that even weather forecasting requires electromagnetic signals. I think that that's news to a lot of people. How does that work?

Charles Baylis (4:07)

Well, it's interesting. We had a project on this that we were working on a couple of years ago.

And I learned from some others, as we were working on this project, that weather radiometers actually are able to read the water vapor in the atmosphere. Water actually emits radiation at 23.6 gigahertz to 3.8 gigahertz in that range there. And so what weather radiometers do is they actually listen or try to receive that very faint radiation that atmospheric water vapor emits in those frequencies. Well, what was interesting about the problem we were working on is cell phones were then allocated for 5G, 24 gigahertz. And there was a lot of concern that out of band emissions from these cell phones would actually run right over the water vapor signatures in their emissions and possibly delay forecasts for things like hurricanes and other types of water-based natural disasters.