Pat Hindle, MWJ Editor
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Pat Hindle is responsible for editorial content, article review and special industry reporting for Microwave Journal magazine and its web site in addition to social media and special digital projects. Prior to joining the Journal, Mr. Hindle held various technical and marketing positions throughout New England, including Marketing Communications Manager at M/A-COM (Tyco Electronics), Product/QA Manager at Alpha Industries (Skyworks), Program Manager at Raytheon and Project Manager/Quality Engineer at MIT. Mr. Hindle graduated from Northeastern University - Graduate School of Business Administration and holds a BS degree from Cornell University in Materials Science Engineering.

5G Interference Issues Continue

February 22, 2022

2 Comments

While many have been focused on the 5G C-Band interference issues with commercial airline altimeters, there is also an issue with these same signals interfering with satellite downlinks. In many territories, there is only a 20 MHz guard band between 5G C-Band signals and satellite downlinks which is even less than the guard band for altimeters in most cases.

The Satellite Interference Reduction Group survey stated:

93% of SAT operators experience interference issues > 1x/year
50% of operators experience interference > 1x per month
17% of operators see interference issues continuously in their day-to-day operations

Anritsu Fig 1

Anritsu Fig 2

The addition of a bandpass filter in front of the LNB will probably be needed in many cases and would help with other types of interference from other satellites over lapping into the line of sight of ground stations.

Many test and measurement companies offer spectrum monitoring equipment and Anritsu just released rack mount remote spectrum monitors with frequencies up to 43.5 GHz in addition to remote monitoring software. These can be setup to monitor many ground stations remoting at the same time and display any unexpected signals. These will be powerful tools as more frequencies are rolled out for 5G and higher frequencies are used in satellite applications.