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Jules Cohen

Consulting Engineer, USA
Retired February 2009

JCohen4125@aol.com

Andrew Clegg

U.S. National Science Foundation
Washington, DC USA

aclegg@nsf.gov

Jules Cohen received the degree of Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1938.  His first professional experience was with consulting engineering firms in the City of Seattle, then with the Bonneville Power Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior, where he served as a junior engineer and assistant engineer in the substation design section.  He was commissioned in the Navy in May of 1942 and served for three and one-half years as a naval officer during World War II.  His duties included training at Harvard, at MIT and at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Corpus Christi.  He was a project officer on radar beacons at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, then at the Bureau of Ships.  Under the Commander, Service Forces, Pacific Fleet, he was in responsible charge of the radar beacon program for the Pacific Fleet.  His last duty station in the Navy was as Executive Officer of the Electronics Division, Commander Service Forces, Pacific Fleet.

                Following release from the Navy, he entered the field of consulting engineering and has been so engaged for over 60 years.  During 55 of those 60 years, he has been a sole principal, partner or corporate president in a consulting engineering firm.  He has been licensed to practice as a professional engineer in the District of Columbia since 1952, has been licensed to practice as a professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia since 1954 and is licensed to practice as a professional engineer in the State of Maryland.  During the period of his professional practice, he has provided professional engineering services in the fields of broadcasting and both wired and wireless communications.  During the past 30 or more years of his practice, an important aspect of his work has been the analysis by calculations and measurements of radio-frequency exposure.  On January 1, 1988, he retired from the presidency of Jules Cohen & Associates, P.C., but has continued providing professional consulting services to selected clients.

                Over 10,000 projects of varying levels of complexity have been carried out by him or under his direction.  Work performed has included radio-frequency propagation studies, interference studies, frequency allocation surveys, radiation hazard evaluations, standard broadcast directional antenna design and adjustment, AM, FM, TV and cell phone field strength measurements, television picture quality assessment, satellite earth station studies, the planning and placement of cellular and other communications structures, studio and transmitting plant layouts for both radio and television, equipment evaluation, and extensive work involving the engineering aspects of changes in the rules of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

                He was the author of Appendix C of the 1975 Cable Television Advisory Committee Panel II report to the FCC.  That appendix dealt with the problem of echoes in television systems.  He is also the author of the section on low power television in the 1986 edition of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology.  He was co-author of Section 2.9, Human Exposure to RF Radiation in the Eighth Edition of the National Association of Broadcasters Engineering Handbook.  As chairman of the engineering committee concerned with interference to television broadcasting from noncommercial FM stations, he played a major role in the development of the rules adopted by the FCC governing the assignment of FM stations in the frequency band from 88.1 to 91.9 MHz.  He represented television broadcast interests as co-chairman of the Technical Analysis Working Group of the Land Mobile Radio/UHF Television Technical Advisory Committee.

                From the time of its inception in 1983 to 1996, Jules Cohen represented the members of the Association of Maximum Service Television, Inc. (MSTV) in subcommittees and technical groups of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC).  From 1996 to September 1998, he represented the IEEE on the Executive Committee of the ATSC.  He has participated as a member, co-chairman or vice chairman of a number of ATSC Technical Groups.  As stated in its Charter, the purpose of the ATSC “[Is] to explore the need for and, where appropriate, to coordinate development of voluntary national technical standards for Advanced Television Systems.”

                His participation in the work of the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service (ACATS) began in November 1987, the starting date set by the FCC, and continued until the completion of the Advisory Committee’s work in November, 1995.  He was a member of Working Parties 1 and 2 of the Systems Subcommittee (SS/WP-1 and 2), and Working Parties 3, 4 and 6 of the Planning Subcommittee (PS/WP-3, 4 and 6).  Under SS/WP-2 he chaired the Field Testing Task Force.  That Task Force completed field testing of the Grand Alliance Digital Television System in October, 1995.  Mr. Cohen had a major role in preparing both the specifications for the field testing and preparation of the report following field testing.  Under PS/WP-3, he chaired the Spectrum Analysis Working Group.

                Clients have included: all five of the major television networks (ABC. CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS), the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), MSTV, the Electronic Industry Association (now the Consumer Electronics Association), major group owners of radio and television stations, individual radio and television stations, and Cellular System and Personal Communications System providers.  He has also provided engineering services to community and citizen groups relative to the placement of broadcast and wireless communications facilities.

               He was a member of American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Committee C95 that developed the 1982 ANSI Standard C95.1-1982 Safety Levels with Respect to Human Exposure to Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields, 300 kHz to 100 GHz.  He is a member of the IEEE International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety (ICES) and Subcommittee IV, which completed a revision to ANSI Standard C95.1-1982, now identified as IEEE C95.1-2005.  Subcommittee IV is continuing evaluation of scientific literature for possible further updating of the standard.  He is a member of ICES Subcommittee I that developed IEEE Standard C95.3-1991, and the 2002 revision titled IEEE Recommended Practice for Measurements and Computations of Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Fields With Respect to Human Exposure to Such Fields, 100 kHz-300GHz.  He is a member of the IEEE Committee on Man and Radiation (COMAR).  He is also a member of Committee 89-2 of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP).  Committee 89-2 has prepared Report No. 119 A Practical Guide to the Determination of Human Exposure to Radiofrequency Fields.  Under contract to the NAB, he prepared a suggested revision to FCC OST Bulletin No. 65, taking into account the ANSI/IEEE 1992 exposure guide.

                   He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, engineering scholastic honorary, a member of the National Society of Professional Engineers, a Life Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Life Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), a charter member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, a past president of the Association of Federal Communications Consulting Engineers (AFCCE) and former chairman of that association’s Radiation Hazard Subcommittee.  He was selected for the 1988 NAB Engineering Achievement Award, a 1990 Achievement Award of the Broadcast Pioneers Washington, DC chapter and a 1999 award from the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society for a lifetime of service to the broadcasting industry and to the Society.  During the year 2000 convention of the NAB, he received a further award from the NAB engineers for his over fifty years of service to the broadcast community and a Pioneers award from the Broadcasters’ Foundation.  In November, 2006, he received the E. Noel Luddy Award of the AFCCE for “Years of Service to the Communications Community.”

Andrew Clegg received a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Virginia in 1985, and Masters (1989) and PhD (1991) degrees in radio astronomy (major) and electrical engineering (minor) from Cornell University. After graduation, he was awarded a National Research Council postdoctoral research associateship at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. He performed research in radio astronomy, concentrating on the propagation effects on cosmic radio waves due to scattering off of electron density irregularities in the ionized interstellar medium. While at NRL, he organized an international conference on the topic of astrophysical masers, which are naturally-occurring maser sources typically found within regions of active star formation. After completing his postdoctoral position at NRL, he was appointed to the Federal government civil service at NRL, where his research became more involved with terrestrial remote sensing applications, including passive microwave sensing, hyperspectral imaging, and synthetic aperture radar.

During his research on remote sensing at NRL, he became more aware of the challenges in finding interference-free radio spectrum in which to conduct passive (non-transmitting) sensing, both for terrestrial applications and for radio astronomy. He became involved in the Federal government spectrum management process as a National Science Foundation representative to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee (IRAC), where he helped champion government spectrum policy on behalf of science services, especially radio astronomy.

His exposure at the IRAC to the broader range of technical and policy issues related to managing the radio spectrum lead him to leave Federal government service to pursue engineering and spectrum management work in private industry. He began as a senior engineer at Comsearch, a Virginia-based wireless consulting firm, where he helped develop software to predict clearing requirements for existing microwave links within the 1850 – 1990 MHz band, which had been recently reallocated to second-generation cellular telephone systems. He helped train customers on the use of the software, and also participated in various industry standards bodies to help develop requirements upon which coordination conditions were based.

His work at Comsearch and within the industry standards bodies lead him to be offered a senior manager position at BellSouth Mobility DCS in Atlanta, where he performed regulatory engineering work in support of the deployment of one of the nation’s first GSM networks. While in Atlanta, he rode the wave of mergers and acquisitions to a position as Lead Member of Technical Staff for Cingular Wireless, then the nation’s largest wireless telecommunications company. Among the technical projects he spearheaded at Cingular was the evaluation and trials of multiple competing technologies to meet the FCC’s Phase II E911 mandate, which requires emergency calls from cell phones to be located to better than 100 m accuracy.

Desiring a return to the Washington, DC, area, he accepted a Federal civil service position with the National Science Foundation, where he has been for the past six years. At NSF, he continues to promote access to the radio spectrum by science services, particularly radio astronomy, through participation in a variety of industry, government, and regulatory forums, including the National Spectrum Management Association (NSMA), IEEE, IRAC and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He presently serves as Vice Chair of U.S. Working Party 7D (Radio Astronomy) of the ITU.

Dr. Clegg has served two terms as president of the NSMA, is the co-inventor of four patents in the field of wireless communications, and has served as an expert witness in wireless technology. He is a senior member of the IEEE and participates in several IEEE societies, including the Broadcast Technology Society, Antennas and Propagation Society, Consumer Electronics Society, Electromagnetic Compatibility Society, and the Vehicular Technology Society.