Radio Frequency Measurement - ITS ↑ Back to top The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site. The site is secure. The ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely. ITS Home Research Radio Frequency Measurement Radio Spectrum Measurement Spectrum Monitoring Institute for Telecommunication Sciences Research Radio Frequency Measurement / Radio Frequency Measurement Being able to accurately measure the power, frequency, and propagation of known and unknown signals is fundamental to understanding today’s radio frequency (RF) environment and essential to calculating whether different transmitters might feasibly coexist in the same or adjacent spectrum. ITS has for decades been an acknowledged leader in applying sophisticated capabilities and a great degree of expertise to collecting high-fidelity RF measurements. The fundamental physics that describe how radio waves propagate (travel in space) and how they can be made to carry information (sound, images, data) as they propagate has not changed since ITS first started researching radio waves over 60 years ago. However, our ability to acquire information about the behavior of radio waves has greatly expanded as the capability and sophistication of measurement and computing devices has increased. RF measurement data collected by the ITS Radio Spectrum Measurement Sciences (RSMS) program is used by NTIA, other federal agencies, and industry to prevent and, if necessary, resolve interference problems involving federal systems. Spectrum monitoring capabilities developed in the past decade are enabling distributed, persistent, and automated monitoring of the RF environment in order to protect mission-critical government systems.