I’m building xcl.is — an amateur cellular network that runs real LTE on ham bands. This is not “ham radio” over Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile. It’s actual ham radio, with ham radio rules and privileges.
Ham radio, by accident of international spectrum allocations, has spectrum overlap with some global LTE/5G bands. By accident of globalization, your existing cell phone’s modem likely already supports those bands, and will Just Work.
This means we, as hams, can operate ham radio cellular networks on ham radio frequencies, under ham radio rules, if we have a way to comply with all Part 97 requirements. I’ve published operating standards detailing the methods of complying with Part 97, including implementations of the xcl.is standard across open source cellular projects like Open5GS and srsRAN.
I demonstrate existing, off-the-shelf cellular products that work with this standard, operating under full compliance with ham radio regulations. Many existing phones and modems will, just by switching a SIM card or enrolling an eSIM, become amateur radios with all the capabilities that a ham-radio cellular network can provide.
The name
XCL.IS is the “eXperimental Cellular Lab InfraStructure” — the caps spell it out. Pronounce it like “excellis”. XCL.im is a sister domain — “excellim” — you’ll see that too.
The focus stays squarely on Amateur spectrum and rules, but it’s lowercase amateur too: a superset of Amateur. Amateur spectrum is preferable wherever possible, so the work keeps a distinctly Amateur focus, while amateur options like LTE-U and CBRS benefit from the same standards.
Code, docs, and contact
Code and docs are moving to the project’s own Forgejo at git.xcl.is (coming soon). The old AmateurCellular GitHub org is deprecated.
Chat happens on Discord for now, with a self-hosted fallback at chat.xcl.is (coming soon). Treat chat like IRC — ephemeral, not a store of information.
If you’d like to take part and can’t use those, email xcl [at) tarxvf ]dot( tech and we can set up something like office hours on Jitsi.
About the author
I’m W2FBI. For my other radio and software projects, see tarxvf.tech, rf.band, and dmr.tools.