UHF band for hand held radio application - RF Cafe Forums

The original RF Cafe Forums were shut down in late 2012 due to maintenance issues - primarily having to spend time purging garbage posts from the board. At some point I might start the RF Cafe Forums again if the phpBB software gets better at filtering spam.

Below are the old forum threads, including responses to the original posts.

-- Amateur Radio
-- Anecdotes, Gripes & Humor
-- Antennas
-- CAE, CAD, & Software
-- Circuits & Components
-- Employment & Interviews
-- Miscellany
-- Swap Shop
-- Systems
-- Test & Measurement
-- Webmaster

lee85
 Post subject: UHF band for hand held radio application
Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 6:43 am 
 
Captain
User avatar

Joined: Fri Dec 14, 2007 11:23 am
Posts: 9
Location: malaysia
hello anyone...

may i know why we used UHF band for walkie-talkie or also known as hand-held radio?


 
   
 
nubbage
 Post subject:
Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 5:01 am 
 
General
User avatar

Joined: Fri Feb 17, 2006 12:07 pm
Posts: 218
Location: London UK
Hya Lee
Basically a trade-off was decided between available spectrum vs technology cost 20 years ago, plus the cross-over point between antenna size and losses like building wall materials, wet leaves on trees etc.
Also 10-20 years ago the band-width per channel needed only to support a single 2-way voice call, so little spectrum was needed per call.
UHF offered a good compromise between the conflicting factors. Antenna size can be small, losses through building materials is only around 10 dB or so, and pipework within buildings ensured re-radiation was possible within a building in UHF. Adequate transmitter power and low receiver noise factors could be achieved at low cost and high repeatability in MMICs at UHF. All this implied a good economic cell radius per base station, so UHF represented the cross-over spectrum where all the conflicting factors for mobile telephones met.
Today there is inevitably a shift towards higher frequencies (L and C band) as technology costs fall, MMICs improve and band-width demand rises.



Posted  11/12/2012