WASHINGTON, D.C.—The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) have announced a joint memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense to allow non-exclusive access to commercial spectrum at 2025-2110 MHz at 26 U.S. military sites. 

The bases were selected for their ability to provide streamlined access to spectrum used by broadcasters for electronic newsgathering and other purposes. DoD activities at these bases will include test and training missions to assure readiness and enable critical communications. 

The agreement follows nearly seven years of technical study, and laboratory and field testing. The memorandum of understanding is designed to ensure the coexistence of newsgathering and other broadcast operations with critical military training missions. 

The spectrum was identified for potential sharing in advance of a spectrum auction that the FCC conducted in 2014 that raised more than $44 billion by converting Federal spectrum to flexible commercial use. House Energy and Commerce member and vice chair of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, Rep. Doris Matsui (CA-06), led the effort that identified this spectrum.

The joint agreement demonstrates the commitment of broadcasters and DoD to advance both the nation's economic prosperity and national security interests, while maintaining public access to critical news and information provided by broadcasters, the parties said. 

"This innovative agreement between the DoD and broadcasters will enable important military communications and newsgathering operations to coexist by balancing ever-increasing demand for spectrum access,” said Robert Weller, vice president for Spectrum Policy at NAB. “America's radio and television broadcasters are committed to collaborative spectrum usage that best serves the interests of our country and the millions of listeners and viewers who depend on us every day. We thank the DoD and SBE for working with us to reach an amicable arrangement that ensures a sustainable model for frequency allocation.”

"Frequency coordination is one of the foundation pillars of the Society of Broadcast Engineers,” added SBE president Andrea Cummis said. “In addition to coordination among broadcasters in a market, the SBE has worked with commercial groups and government agencies in the past to minimize if not eliminate interference in the limited RF spectrum available for broadcast operations. This agreement provides our partners at the DoD and the NAB and the SBE the tools to ensure the public is best served through the shared use of this spectrum."

At a number of locations, broadcasters were able to identify "home channels" -- spectrum where DoD will have presumptive access, while some locations will require active coordination as is done at major media events such as the Super Bowl. The SBE has set up a national frequency management office headed by RJ Russell, national frequency coordination manager, at the Society of Broadcast Engineers to handle coordination requests. That office will ensure consistent analysis and response timing. Previously, coordination was handled at the local level.

The Society of Broadcast Engineers is the professional organization of television and radio engineers and those in related fields. The SBE has nearly 5,000 members in 116 chapters across the United States and in Hong Kong and Eastern Europe. There are also members in more than 25 other countries. 

For more information about the SBE, contact James Ragsdale, executive director, at jragsdale@sbe.org or 317-846-9000, or visit the SBE website, sbe.org.

GERMANTOWN, Md.—Hughes Network Systems has received a $18 million contract from the Department of Defense (DoD) to deploy a standalone 5G network at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state using spectrum from Dish. 

Hughes will serve as the prime contractor connecting the base with a secure 5G network to support operations, maintenance and flight traffic management. This work is part of on-going DoD 5G experimentation led by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

"Over the course of this three-year project, we will demonstrate for the U.S. Department of Defense how 5G infrastructure from Hughes – including a packet processing core, radio access, edge cloud, security and network management – can power the resilient networking necessary to transform base operations," said Dr. Rajeev Gopal, vice president, Advanced Programs, Hughes. "Today's walkie-talkies, paper-trails and telephone conversations will be replaced with a private, secure 5G network over which air station processes and systems will be automated and continuously optimized. What's more, the standalone, standards-based configuration – including O-RAN standards for flexibility – will connect seamlessly anywhere on the planet using Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geostationary Orbit (GEO) satellite connectivity."

"Dish is delivering the connectivity for this private 5G network, providing engineering services, support and access to our spectrum portfolio," said Stephen Bye, chief commercial officer, Dish. "As we build our own network, we're proud to team with Hughes in this important project to deliver a fast, secure, reliable network to serve the U.S. Department of Defense and support mission-critical functions."

Working together on the project, with Hughes as the integrator, are: Boingo Wireless, Cisco, Dell, Dish, JMA Wireless and Intel.

INDIANAPOLIS—The Society of Broadcast Engineers has announced that it has reached an agreement to provide spectrum coordination services for the Department of Defense in the 2025–2110 MHz/2 GHz range. That range is a slice of the Broadcast Auxiliary Service. It also includes some civilian mobile, military and other federal activities such as NASA communications.

The DoD is developing and deploying training systems that will be active in that range in a number of locations across the country. Since it is shared spectrum, the department wanted to avoid disruption of the services as well as disrupting civilian and commercial services also using that range.

That particular range is used by radio and TV stations, notably STLs/TLSes, auxiliary broadcasting such as translators, cable TV relays and more. After consultation with the SBE along with the National Association of Broadcasters the department has entered into an agreement with the SBE for the broadcast engineering association to provide nationwide frequency coordination services.

According to a release the SBE board of directors approved the agreement in April. The association has selected the broadcast consulting firm Technical Broadcast Solutions. Its principal is R.J. Russell, CPBE, a 20-year member of the SBE. He was most recently also SBE national vice president and chair of its Frequency Coordination Committee.

SBE President Jim Leifer said, “Part of the SBE’s mission is to create working alliances within the broadcast industry and with those who work in our space. Entering into this agreement serves to protect broadcaster’s use of spectrum and provides a needed service to our government. I am pleased that we are able to partner with the DoD’s prime contractor in this effort.”

COLUMBIA, MD.—For two decades, Ed Grogan has been hunkered over video monitors and computer terminals performing a very unusual type of video “quality control.” This particular QC work, however, doesn’t result in less-than-perfect footage being sent back to the colorist or returned to the production company to be reshot. In Grogan’s case, what he sees or doesn’t see may make the difference between American lives being lost or unnecessary deployment of big-ticket military resources.

Grogan, a four-decade civilian employee of the U.S. Department of Defense, has spent half of his career directly or indirectly involved in the relatively new field of video forensics—a painstaking and careful analysis of recordings produced by enemies of the state for any evidence of less-than-honest presentation of events, and any and all clues that could spell fakery.

So, why the interest in such video?

Grogan spelled out the answer very bluntly.

“American lives may be at stake,” he said. “Terrorists don’t get paid unless they can show that they killed or injured Americans,” adding that terrorists are not always inspired by idealism or religious fervor, but rather as a means of financial support for themselves and their nefarious activities.

“Sometimes they manipulate the video they’re submitting for payment to show things that didn’t really happen,” Grogan added. “In other cases, recordings are prepared for propaganda purposes—to show that they fought with the ‘infidels,’ to show that they are in tune with the mission, and to try and get others to follow along in what they are doing.”

Grogan offered a recording of a motorized improvised explosive being remotely piloted to explode under a military vehicle as an example of this attempted video legerdemain.

“In some of the videos it was obvious that the bomb went off early by several frames,” he said. “This probably damaged the radiator rather than the main parts of the vehicle. The bad guys drop a few frames and this moves the explosion so that it looks like they made a direct hit on the vehicle or whatever when they really didn’t. That’s quite creative—just offsetting things a few frames. They haven’t necessarily been good at this sort of manipulation, but have gotten better over time—at least some of them.”

Grogan speculates that the quality improvements may be the result of terrorists now relying on professional videographers and post-production specialists.

“We’re seeing really good skill sets in some of the more recent stuff,” he said. “They do make mistakes from time to time, though. Sometimes they’re not good at greenscreen work, or they do a garbage matte and someone will put his hand right through the matte. Maybe this is just for a frame or two, so you have to look quickly.”

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE

In the case of the military video forensics, decisions as to whether it’s real or manipulated have to be rendered very quickly to avoid either placing lives at stake or unnecessarily—and very expensively—deploying military resources that could be better utilized elsewhere.

“We have to look at all the videos and make decisions based on this evaluation, because if the videos are real, someone has to be alerted as to where American or allied forces might have been killed or injured,” Grogan said. “I get calls every now and then with someone saying ‘we’ve got some footage and they want a report all the way up to the President—what do you think?’ They’ll tell us ‘you’ve got 20 minutes; please send us your thoughts.’”

MANY CLUES IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK

During his career as a video forensics analyst, Grogan has compiled a checklist of some 90 “fingerprints” that could suggest less than truthful presentation of events.

“Any time I saw what appeared to be a mistake, I wrote it down.” Over time he was able to reduce the original list down to about 50 items. These include:

● Stuck pixels
● Errors in focus and lighting in various parts of images
● Gamma errors
● Reflections that don’t match the object supposedly casting the reflections
● Histograms that don’t match across certain scenes
● Errors seen in shadows and reflections of objects
● Inconsistent black levels across a frame
● Incorrect intermixing of even and odd video fields
● Mixing of 8-bit and 10-bit video

TOOLS OF THE [BOGUS VIDEO] TRADE

Grogan said terrorists have been known to use any tools that can be pirated to doctor video; however, some of the bad guys do stay up-to-date with post-production software and may even secure legitimate copies.

“Over time, terrorists have gotten fairly good at creating stuff that was faked to make their point,” said Grogan, adding that there are exceptions. In one case, implementation of Adobe software by a less-than-fully-knowledgeable group resulted in much consternation by forensicists.

“This was back in the analog NTSC and PAL days. We were seeing a lot of stuff that was really, really weird,” he said, referring to motion artifacts being observed. “It was just plain stupid and we couldn’t explain why.”

Eventually the answer came from an individual who had knowledge of video production as practiced in the Middle East.

“Through luck we got to talk to this guy,” he said. “And he told us what was happening, saying, ‘Oh, I can explain that. We opened the box from Adobe, loaded it and ran it. We took the video in and processed it and outputted it. I knew that it was set for American standards and everything we were doing was PAL, but we were directed not to change any settings, so the software converted the (frame rate, and line count) going in and coming out. This was the philosophy. Don’t touch the software settings. If it came from the company that way it must be right!’”

This quickly explained the dropped/added frames and other previously inexplicable artifacts observed in the video.

HOW DO YOU GET TO BE A VIDEO FORENSICIST?

Asked about his career track, Grogan was quick to state that scrutiny of video was not really part of his educational track, as his formal training was in electrical engineering. Shortly after taking his BS degree from Drexel University, he first took a job at the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard while earning his MSEE. Grogan then accepted a position in Washington, D.C., with his initial duties involving military communications and the development of engineering solutions for problems being reported in the field.

“I never worked in broadcasting,” said Grogan, “But I was the AV guy in high school, and while I was in college, I did do some work in video production for a cable TV company, but I liked the hardware side of things better.”

His eventual springboard into video detective work stemmed from a conversation with a co-worker.

“We had a secure phone and one of the guys said that he couldn’t wait until we had a picture phone, as then he wouldn’t have to take the steps necessary to verify who was calling. I said ‘yeah, provided you could trust the video, because I could fake it.’ This was around 1996 and I knew enough about Hollywood then to know things like this could be faked.

“I wrote a technical paper on this and rather quickly the question arose that if I could create fake video, could I detect it? My paper got circulated through the DoD and I was asked to do some briefings. Later, I was asked to teach classes on the effects of video deception. This is how I entered the world of video forensics.”

Grogan continued to screen recordings for tampering, eventually doing “post-graduate” work of a sorts with a DoD-sponsored four-month stay in Hollywood, where he had free access to most all of the post-production houses there and got to observe that community’s professionals at work in creating visual effects for the big screen.

“That was extremely helpful,” he said.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Although not now directly involved in video forensics, Grogan does step in to assist from time to time, and observed that sometimes identifying video prestidigitation can depend on one’s perspective. He recalled a particular incident in which he was asked to evaluate a scene involving movement of a vehicle at dusk.

“I said that I didn’t think it was possible for the camera to capture such a lousy image of the truck while at the same time producing such gorgeous images of the stars above,” he said. “Sometime later, one of the new hires—a young kid really—looked at the same video and recognized the buildings in the scene, saying ‘Oh that’s from the so-and-so video game.’ He correctly identified footage the bad guys had appropriated from a game.”

Grogan recalled another case involving propaganda footage of an airliner being shot down. He calculated the required elevation of the camera to capture the images shown, and quickly determined that it couldn’t have been on the ground.

To further “ice the cake,” Grogan said one of the younger teammates was able to identify the explosion in the propaganda video as having been excerpted from a video game. “We were able to match it pixel-by-pixel,” he said, noting that “perhaps there just may be a future for people who are hung up on playing video games.”