ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® in a recent filing encouraged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to listen to industry stakeholders about the detrimental impacts that changes to the 902-928 MHz band would have for current users.

The FCC is considering a petition by NextNav, Inc., a licensee in the 900-MHz Location and Monitoring Service (LMS), to reconfigure the 902-928 MHz band to obtain more spectrum for itself and replace the LMS with high-power 5G cellular and related positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services that would supplement GPS. ARRL filed comments opposing NextNav’s proposal in September 2024.

Read more: NextNav’s proposal on ARRL News (8/15/2024)
Read more: ARRL Defends 902-928 Amateur Radio Band (9/12/2024)

ARRL’s latest filing [PDF] was submitted on May 13, 2025, by the association’s Washington Counsel in response to an inquiry initiated by the Commission to consider more broadly ways to improve and harden GPS. ARRL’s response echoes concerns of many others and underscores the need to improve and harden the current GPS system in a manner that doesn’t impact radio amateurs and other users of the 902-928 MHz band. The band supports an extraordinary number of unlicensed consumer devices used by consumers both inside and outside the United States with which radio amateurs co-exist.

ARRL strongly agrees with the many parties that point out in the record of this proceeding that, in working with its sister federal agencies on this issue, one of the Commission’s primary goals should be to ensure that existing services already operating in the spectrum, such as in the crowded 902-928 MHz band, should not be disrupted by complementary PNT if equal or better means are available. Many billions of unlicensed devices are in use to provide hundreds of applications and functionalities to the American public, and the number of devices and the functionalities that they provide continue to grow.

These devices coexist with amateur radio operations in the 902-928 MHz band but they as well as amateur radio operations would be displaced if a 5G-like PNT service was authorized to use this spectrum.

In the instant proceeding the FCC addresses GPS concerns holistically that also are being addressed by multiple other federal government agencies under the direction of the President.  ARRL emphasized the FCC’s expertise and role in making the best use of the spectrum resource.

We commend the Commission for initiating this proceeding to take a holistic approach to the problem and possible solutions thereto, rather than a piece-meal approach that might have led to systems that would unnecessarily use valuable spectrum with inferior results and take years longer to construct from scratch. The Commission is the civilian spectrum expert among the collection of agencies that are addressing this issue. We rely on the Commission to make clear the value of each megahertz of spectrum and the trade-offs in designating any particular band for the purpose of complementary PNT.

ARRL’s filing is intended to emphasize the public interest in protecting amateur and others’ access to the 902-928 MHz band and to highlight that other, less disruptive options are available for PNT.

ARRL will continue to defend amateur access to this and other threatened amateur allocations.