As part of its plan to swap its AMC-6 and AMC-3 satellites (see 1610170014), SES filed a notification Tuesday with the FCC International Bureau that AMC-3's license should be modified to reflect it's moving from 67 degrees west to 72 degrees west. AMC-3 will operate within the technical parameters licensed and coordinated for AMC-6, currently at 72 degrees west, and the move will start no sooner than 30 days after the notification's filing, said the satellite company.

Silkwave Africa wants to buy the AfriStar-1 satellite from satellite operator Yazmi and also take over geostationary satellite authorization for AfriStar-2, said an FCC International Bureau filing Tuesday by Yazmi. The satellite provides broadcast satellite services over Africa and the Middle East and parts of Asia and Europe, and prospective owner Silkwave intends to continue and expand operations of the AfriStar satellite system. Silkwave is owned by CEO Chau-Chi Wong of Hong Kong, who's the sole member of Chi Capital, a Cayman Islands company, said Yazmi. Yazmi bought the satellites in 2010 as part of original owner WorldSpace's Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it said, saying it and Silkwave in September signed an asset purchase agreement for the AfriStar-1 satellite and related regulatory authorizations.

With the FCC having approved Planet Labs' low earth orbit constellation of up to 200 satellites, ViaSat is asking for approval to operate an S-band earth station to provide telemetry, tracking and control for them. In an International Bureau filing Monday, ViaSat said the uplink, employing a 5.4-meter dish, would be outside of Pendergrass, Georgia, the company's second choice of location, and an earlier application for an uplink in Duluth, Georgia, was withdrawn after it became clear that site, closer to Atlanta, would cause interference to Atlanta-area 2 GHz TV broadcast auxiliary service operations.

The YouTube app is integrated into Dish's Hopper 3 DVR, letting its subscribers view the Alphabet/Google content without changing devices or inputs, Dish Network said in a news release Friday. It came in a software update to Hopper 3 set-tops, it said. Dish is the only nationwide pay-TV provider to integrate YouTube into its set-top box, it said.

The FCC International Bureau is proposing updates to Part 2 and 25 rules specifically to facilitate deployment of non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) fixed satellite service constellations. An FCC official told us the NPRM put on circulation Friday also seeks comment on technical rules for spectrum sharing. The official said the agency asks for input on its current rule governing in-line events -- when two NGSO systems come within 10 degrees of aligning with each other, necessitating either coordination or splitting of spectrum -- and whether that 10-degree rule should be modified. It also seeks comment on a SpaceX proposal on the FCC's rule requiring an NGSO constellation to be completely launched within six years of license grant, with the company pushing for a lower milestone of 75 percent of the constellation, the official said. The NPRM likely won't be on a future monthly meeting agenda but voted on circulation, the official said.

To meet potential service demand at 169.2 degrees east, Intelsat wants temporarily to relocate its 1R satellite there, it said in an FCC International Bureau application Tuesday for special temporary authority for the drift: 1R would move from 50.1 degrees west, with the drift starting Jan. 1 and taking roughly four months. At 169.2 degrees east, 1R will operate using 5925-6425 MHz, 13750-14500 MHz and 11700-12200 MHz uplinks and 3700-4200 MHz, 10950-11200 MHz and 11450-11950 MHz downlinks, the company said.

Dish Network and plaintiffs in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act class-action complaint are at odds over jury verdict instructions for the upcoming trial in U.S. District Court in Greensboro, North Carolina. In a trial memo filed Tuesday, the company and plaintiffs Thomas Krakauer and the others said they agreed on numerous issues on the verdict sheet, but some issues remain contested. Krakauer and the others said a point of contention is whether the number of calls or the phone numbers should be on the verdict sheet. They said they plan to introduce that information as evidence "and there is no need to re-state that evidence on the verdict sheet, and no need to force the jury to engage in mathematical computations." Dish said Krakauer and the others object to having the jury decide whether the class members actually received the telemarketing calls at issue or are the subscribers of the phone numbers called, but the court should toss out the plaintiffs' proposal to have a claims administrator post-trial decide this, instead of the jury. "There is no justification for relieving Plaintiff of his burden at trial on this one issue," Dish said. It also said the jury should be given the choice of assessing damages per call violation or on an aggregate basis. Either way, Dish added, the court can make sure any damages award doesn't exceed $500 per call.

NTIA's push for amending the U.S. table of frequency allocations so federal earth stations communicating with commercial satellites get better interference protection (see 1610040019) could create imbalance in the commercial launch service sector through limits on the flexibility different providers need, Lockheed Martin said in an FCC ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 13-115. The company also backed keeping the status quo in spectrum allocations used for launches and said the FCC special temporary authority process "provides adequate spectrum access on an equitable basis." Lockheed Martin said if the FCC does change allocations to support commercial space launches, the new rules need to accommodate current launch providers: NTIA's proposal to restrict which frequencies nonfederal launch providers can access would mean bigger hurdles for some commercial launch providers than for others. The company urged the FCC to allow competitive service providers that routinely use any new nonfederal allocation in the 2200-2290 MHz band the flexibility to go beyond a five megahertz bandwidth when necessary. The filing recapped a meeting involving Lockheed Martin Director-Technical Regulatory Affairs Scott Kotler with International Bureau personnel, including Satellite Division Head Jose Albuquerque. NTIA didn't comment Tuesday.

With GPS Adjacent-Band Compatibility (ABC) Assessment L-band testing done, the next step is coming up with tolerable equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) levels to protect GPS from adjacent band interference, the Transportation Department told us Tuesday. Those tolerable EIRP levels will come from radiated test interference tolerance masks, use case scenarios representing relevant applications and services, and propagation modeling, Transportation said. The agency presented its ABC testing results Friday at a workshop and said there are no further plans for testing. That testing comes as Ligado has been trying to get FCC approval for its broadband terrestrial low-power service in spectrum adjacent to GPS and arguing that the proposed power and out-of-band emission levels protect GPS (see 1602250032). Ligado in a statement said it's "glad that DOT's nearly two years of testing is finally over. Now the government agencies with authority over our nation’s spectrum policy, the FCC and the NTIA, can take this information and all the other studies into account and make critical decisions. It is odd that the DOT study did not address at all the actual harm to consumers, as the other studies did. DOT also made clear that it recommends a mask based on the worst device it could find. Others will have to decide whether that is sound policy.” DOT said the reacquisition tests that were part of wired testing showed that for some receivers, there wasn't significant margin beyond the interference power causing 1 dB degradation. The degradation was particularly apparent for lower-power GPS signals, like those that would be associated with operating in challenged environments such as urban canyons or under foliage or with low-elevation satellites in open skies, DOT said. When asked about what its test findings might mean for actual device performance, the agency said the wired testing results "suggest exceeding the 1 dB interference level can adversely affect receiver performance by slowing satellite acquisition times." The department said radiated test results -- which show "the more comprehensive view of adjacent band interference causing a 1 dB degradation" in carrier to noise ratio -- were nonetheless "in good agreement ... when the performance of the active antennas were taken into consideration."

SES hopes to move its AMC-6 satellite from 72 degrees west to 67 degrees west and swap it with AMC-3, which then will relocate to 72 degrees west, the satellite company said in an FCC International Bureau filing Friday: The swap will let it "better respond to customer requirements" at the two orbital locations and improve its fleet management. The relocated AMC-6 will operate at 67 degrees west in conjunction with AMC-4, which already is there, SES said.