Possible 5G Effects on Weather Satellites Said to Need Study
5G and weather stakeholders should talk so there's better understanding of issues like fifth-generation installation density, how quickly those terrestrial transmission signals fall off outside their main channels and how those will affect passive weather monitoring via satellite, Aerospace Corp.…
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Senior Project Leader David Lubar said on a webinar Tuesday. Of millimeter wave bands used for weather observation, 23.6-24 GHz and 36-37 GHz are adjacent to bands to be used for 5G, he said. Passive earth and atmospheric sensing can't be done using alternate bands, he said. Passive measurements wouldn't know the signal levels being detected aren't correct, corrupting the weather data, he said. It's not clear how out-of-band emissions (OOBE), especially unidentified contamination, might affect meteorological products, he said. A radio receiver and satellite-based radiometer work differently, so receiver protection techniques aren't applicable to satellites, he said. The 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference limits on 5G base stations in the 24 GHz band will be adopted by most nations, though Europe didn't consider them stringent enough and moved forward by several years the phase-in of those limits, he said. Rather than OOBE limits, a possible solution could be time-sharing of the spectrum, Lubar said.