Oral-History:Dale Hatfield
About Dale Hatfield
Dale N. Hatfield was born in Dayton, Ohio on 8 February 1938 and earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1960, and an M.S. in Industrial Management from Purdue University in 1961. In May 2008, Hatfield was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Colorado for, inter alia, his commitment to the development of interdisciplinary telecommunications studies. Hatfield has nearly fifty years of experience in telecommunications policy and regulation, spectrum management and related areas. Currently, he is an Executive Fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and an Adjunct Professor in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program, both at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His government roles have included senior policymaking roles at the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the Executive Office of the President, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the U.S. Department of Commerce. In the private sector, he established a successful multidisciplinary telecommunications consulting firm and served as a director on the boards of several publicly traded and privately held companies in the telecommunications field.
About the Interview
DALE N. HATFIELD: An Interview Conducted by T. Scott Atkinson, IEEE History Center, 23 March 2023.
Interview #890 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Dale N. Hatfield, an oral history conducted on 23 March 2023 by T. Scott Atkinson, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Dale Hatfield
INTERVIEWER: T. Scott Atkinson
DATE: 23 March 2023
PLACE: Virtual
Early life and Education
Atkinson:
Good morning. Today is March 23rd, 2023. I am Scott Atkinson, a member of the IEEE Communications Society’s History Committee. Today, I am interviewing Professor Dale N. Hatfield. Professor Hatfield is currently an Executive Fellow at the Silicon Flat Iron Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and an adjunct professor in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program, both at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Good morning, Professor.
Hatfield:
Good morning, Sir.
Atkinson:
I welcome you and thank you for your time. Today, we plan to cover a few topics relative to your family and early life, your education, career, association with the IEEE, and reflections regarding the history of technology. Of particular interest to the IEEE is your association with Anita Longley’s legacy regarding the Longley-Rice model (LR).
Let’s get started. Please state your name, full name and the date and place of your birth.
Hatfield:
It’s Dale, my middle name is Norval, Hatfield. I was born on February 9th, 1938, in Dayton, Ohio.
Atkinson:
Tell us a little bit about your family, your parents, and siblings.
Hatfield:
I often describe my family in two parts. We had what I would call the city family and a farm family. My grandfather was a plumber at the Old Soldier’s Home in Dayton, Ohio. My grandmother on the city side, was as often in those days was frustrated and wanted outlets, so she wrote a column for example for the Dayton paper and things like that. She and my grandfather were the city part of my family. Then the farm side of my family, was my mother whose maiden name was Thompson. Her full name was Wava Pearl Hatfield, but her maiden name was Thompson. She grew up on a farm during the Great Depression; it was just a very difficult time. To the extent that I have a work ethic, it comes from spending an awful lot of time working on the farm. To this day, I remember how tough it was on people. From a family of eleven. I spent almost all the time I could there because I loved the farm work and the outdoors.
Atkinson:
How about remembrances of your early life in Ohio.
Hatfield:
There are a number of things of course that stick in my mind. As a young person, I remember we still had party line telephones. In those days we called it the party line, and we had what we called party line farmers. They were other farmers who would listen in on the conversation on the line and make their decisions as to when to plant and so forth based on what they heard on the line. I think there were still even a few crank telephones around, but I don’t remember that. I do distinctly remember early television. This was television that was local because there was no means of importing television from someplace else. There were no networks at that time. The program was all local and it was pretty bad somebody playing the ukulele or something, a local person. Of course, it was only later with microwave, and then eventually satellites of course, that we could import programs. I remember that very well. It seemed like a miracle to watch that snowy picture out on the farm. Of course, today with the ultrahigh definition television [Laughing] and so forth, we sure have come a long way. The other thing too, that I remember distinctly, was this sort of related technology was two-way radios that were in vehicles. The two-way radio, it was private, and that’s the way you communicated. If you had a plumbing shop that’s the way you talked to your employees with these private radios. I remember the radio was so big it took up most of the trunk. If you had a car, the trunk was filled with a radio, tube radios of course, crystal control. You only had one or two channels because there were no such things as frequency synthesizers. When you pushed the talk button to talk to your employees, for example, from the car the headlights would dim because it would draw so much current. That led us of course, and eventually to putting in an alternator. It was an alternator rather than a generator because at low speeds it would generate enough amperage to prevent the lights from dimming. I have those early memories of the technology. I think like most people my age, it really gives you an appreciation of how far we’ve come when I look back to those days.
Atkinson:
What else do you remember?
Hatfield:
Oh, by the way, we still had telegrams. I can remember very well long-distance calls because long distance calls cost several dollars a minute if I remember right. If it was long distance, you go through the house [saying] long distance, somebody’s calling. You would run to the phone because every second counted, so it was a very different world. Of course, to make an international call in those days it was done by High Frequency or short wave radio. It was almost impossible and impossibly expensive. Today, we are doing all this communicating [between us; in comparison] to what we had then is quite [awesome].
Atkinson:
Let’s get back to your early education. Tell us a little bit about your schooling and some of the topics and maybe some of the teachers that may have influenced you at an early age.
Hatfield:
There were two I think defining things for me. One, I asked my father for a Christmas present. I wanted to listen to police calls. He was smart enough [to conclude] he’ll get bored with that pretty [quickly], so he bought me a used shortwave radio receiver. It was a Hallicrafters S-38-C which was a very simple shortwave radio receiver. I remember distinctly tuning it to twenty meters and hearing somebody from Cuba. CO2GJ, I think I can remember his call letters. He was calling CQ from Guantanamo Bay. That hooked me on radio. [I found] you can talk a long way and meet really interesting people with a radio. That led me to getting my [amateur] radio license and then that led in many ways to where I am today.
The other development is there was a [high school] teacher who was teaching basic electronics. One day we got to talking. He said, “Dale, why don’t you teach the class” because he felt that I, at that point, had a better understanding than he did. I remember that. I was a very shy kid. I remember that was my first connection to teaching. I’ve taught essentially all my life. I’ve always had a teaching affiliation, because he encouraged me and gave me confidence that here is something I can do and that I knew this field. Those two things together, experiencing radio and then being able to teach it and having the confidence that I could something, as I said. His [last] name was Sipes. I’m rambling here but of interest to IEEE perhaps was that they had established [an amateur] radio club at the [local] YMCA. The two people who sponsored the club worked at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Remember that Dayton is where the Wright Brothers lived and where Wright Patterson Air Force Base is [located]. They were both engineers. They took me under their wing and helped me learn. For example, their kids weren’t interested in radio. One had a complete shop in his basement for building amateur radio equipment from scratch. I would wander over there on a Saturday and go down in the basement. I’d be trying to build something and when I’d have trouble I’d call up to Ed Parker, I think his name was, and he would come down and help me. That was a formative moment, too. It was because of these engineers who gave back, if you will, or paid forward from their experience that really meant an awful lot to me because my father was supportive of me but didn’t have any technical skills to be able to help advance what I was learning in communications.
Atkinson:
I take it that that was during your high school years?
Hatfield:
Yes, that was high school; graduating in 1956. I was into amateur radio; I think in 1954 or something like that. My first call sign was W0NGG. Nancy, George, George which I had the early call letters.
Atkinson:
How big was your high school class?
Hatfield:
One hundred if I remember.
Atkinson:
A good size.
Hatfield:
Yes, it was nice. In fact, it’s sort of sad now of course. At eighty-five [years old] there’s some attrition occurring now which saddens me greatly.
Atkinson:
Moving on. After graduation from high school, what was your education?
Hatfield:
Here again, it keeps going back to radio. I was looking for a college and wanted to study engineering. I communicated with the ham radio station at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland. It’s a well-respected Midwestern school that was far enough away from home that I’d have some independence, but not too far. [Laughing] I could get home occasionally. I ended up applying to Case [Institute of Technology]. Now it’s Case Western Reserve [University]. I received my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Case in 1960. Then I went from there to Purdue University and got a master’s degree in what was then called Industrial Management.
Atkinson:
You went directly from your undergraduate to your graduate programs?
Hatfield:
Yes, I was fortunate. I got a lot of financial help from the university when I did that and then my parents supplemented that a little bit. That’s what got me to Purdue.
Central Radio Propagation Laboratory, FCC
Atkinson:
Let’s move on then to talk a little bit about your early career after schooling.
Hatfield:
Okay. It keeps coming back to amateur radio. Let me back up. After the war [World War II] was over and gas rationing was lifted, people began to take trips like we think of today: the road trip. At that point, the [Great] Depression was over, and things had picked up, so my parents drove for a family vacation out here to Colorado, which I dearly loved. I still do. I’m here. I’d gone away from time to time, but I’m still here in Boulder. I had an attraction for Colorado because of that trip. I wanted to live here. After I was married, I wanted to stay here.
It turned out that what we sometimes call the Bureau and that’s not correct but it’s [really] the Commerce Facilities here in Boulder. It included a unit called the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL). I can start out by saying for a ham radio operator, working at the lab here, I couldn’t believe it. I mean I was getting paid for doing what I loved to do anyway. [I got the job for two reasons.] I walked in the door and the fellow that hired me, Don Patterson, had a bias towards hams because he said he felt that they had hands-on experience more so than a person who had just studied the theory in college. I had the Industrial Management degree which gave me management training. He was looking for somebody to do project management who understood the technology. He hired me. That was in 1963. He hired me to go to work on a Navy project called the SS-267 Program.
Now why am I saying all this? I’ll get to the point. You mentioned Anita Longley. When I went to CRPL and was involved in the management of the program, I worked with her. Then they hired me for one thing, but it got deeper into the technology part. I kept working technology; that’s when I had my first contact with Anita Longley and Phil Rice.
The Longley-Rice is a famous model, a radio propagation model, and there are still remnants around and still used in some in some cases. That’s the connection back to your comment about Anita Longley. That was the trigger that led me eventually into the policy work that I did later on in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.
Atkinson:
What year would you say that was?
Hatfield:
I came here in 1963 to work at CPRL which today is the Institute of Telecommunications Science (ITS). I ended up working there at a fairly low level, but one of the people I was working with got what was called a Commerce White House Fellowship and [he] went back to D.C. and went to work in the White House. The issue at the time was the crowded geostationary orbit and how many satellites could you fit into the orbit. He says I know this guy Hatfield back in Boulder who is interested in not only the radio stuff but has his management degree and hopefully understands some of the economics and so forth.
I got a call to put [a study] together, [and did so] with a lot of help [from numerous colleagues. [The subject of the] study [dealt with] the feasibility of having competition in the domestic satellite field. [At that time,] it looked [like a single license] would be [issued to operate our domestic satellite system, in which case] AT&T would have had a monopoly. Instead, the studies revealed that there were sufficient parking places [in orbit] to have competition.
The person who did that, another ham by the way, his formal name is Clay T. Whitehead. He was running the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the White House. Talk about mentors, he was younger than me but setting that aside that he was younger than me, he was one of my real mentors. He was very interested in competition. As you know this is before the breakup of the AT&T, before we began to get a lot of competition. I got hooked once I started doing that.
Just like I said, things were changing, and I had an opportunity then to be involved in the breakup of AT&T. I have lived through almost all the sorts of major policy changes since, and I’m still involved to this day in some of the policy issues. That’s how I ended up in working in the White House.
Atkinson:
Sure. Some people would be interested in your position there. Was your office actually in the White House or was it in an associated building close to the White House?
Hatfield:
It was the old Executive Building. Yes. There are all kinds of funny stories with that that I could tell you. It was sort of an adjacent building. We got called to the White House. Now, I don’t want to “aggrandize” my position because I was still kind of junior. I was working for Tom. Of course, Tom would go to the White House. You would get called, so you rushed, put on a tie, and headed over [Laughing]. You went over across the street to the White House. That’s how I got involved in the public policy at the national level. Like I say, Tom was just a wonderful human being, a systems engineer. We hit it off because I considered and still consider myself a systems engineer. He was a systems engineer out of MIT. We hit it off pretty well. He was my first sort of breakthrough into the [Washington] D.C. policy circles.
Atkinson:
[Who was] the President at that time?
Hatfield:
There’s a whole series of events in there. I’m not sure how interesting they would be, but a whole series of interesting events. Of course, it was [Richard] Nixon and then when Nixon left and [Gerald] Ford, of course, took over for a while. It was during that early stage. Now I went from there, the FCC was being run by a fellow, very well-known fellow, Chairman Richard [Dick] Wiley. He invited me, after working at OTP in the White House, he asked me to come over and run the policy shop at the FCC. I went from there to the FCC and ran the Office of Plans and Policy as it was called in those days at the FCC. Here again, another tremendous mentor Dick Wiley was, and he still is just a tremendous person and here again I think he believed in me. We all need people who believe in us. I think he believed in me, and I tried to help. I’m not so much now but I was very shy. I really enjoyed working for somebody who could go out and speak forcefully on policy issues. I was perfectly happy to sit in the background and provide some of the technical economic analysis to support them. But I kind of liked to be in the background because, like I say, because I was shy. Anyway. Dick was one of my major mentors along the way.
Atkinson:
You went to the White House and served there in the capacity of doing research on satellites.
Hatfield:
Well, no, that was the beginning of cellular, too, so we were just starting to do some of the early cellular work. It did go beyond satellites which was sort of the entry thing, the open skies policy. But at the same time there was beginning to open up cellular and trying to figure out if we’re going to get enough spectrum to have you know the early days of cellular.
Atkinson:
Tell us a little bit more about your activities there in the FCC.
Hatfield:
Here again, we were right in the throes of a whole bunch of decisions and also the breakup of AT&T. I was running the policy office. There are different bureaus at the FCC like the Wireless Bureau today and the Wire Line Bureaus in those days. There was a feeling that somebody needed to look at a bigger picture. The Office of Plan and Policy looked at a bigger thing. Look, it almost goes back to system engineering. It looks at a bigger scope of things and saying are we looking at this issue too narrowly. I ran the policy office and therefore worked directly for worked for Dick Wiley and provided advice to the commission about some of the economic issues and so forth that the individual bureaus might not be totally cognizant of. It would be too boring to go into it but there were a lot of interesting issues in those days: the lack of, say, finding more spectrum for wireless issues and the private radio field. Private radio was still a big thing. Most people don’t know it but before cellular there were actually called radio common carriers. Not cellular. They were big coverage areas but not cellular. Two-way radio systems that people used for actually making telephone calls. I could go into an awful lot of stories about how people cheated. For example, they had channel grabbers. It was so congested that when one person would hang up, the channel grabber, software probably, mostly hardware in those days would grab the channel before somebody else could. There just wasn’t enough spectrum to accommodate lots of different mobile telephone subscribers. Of course, that’s Carter Phone, things you’ve heard about. I could go into a whole history there of the Carter phone decision and the involvement in it and so forth.
Atkinson:
Can you tell us after you left the FCC, how did you leave or why did you leave? Where did you go from there?
Hatfield:
[Laughing] I think I can say somewhat proudly, I wasn’t directly fired. [Laughing]. But what happened was at those higher-level jobs you’re sort of expected to resign when there was a change in presidency. I had one of those jobs and unfortunately my wife did, too. She worked for [???]-- that’s where I met her. She was working for Chairman Wiley. We simultaneously [Laughing] lost our jobs. Not for cause [Laughing]. I would hate to say that. We lost our jobs because that’s the way it was. Fortunately, I came back here to Boulder at the lab. I went to work back at the labs again. It was called something different at that point. No longer CRPL.
Atkinson:
What was the name of the lab when you went back?
Hatfield:
Institute for Telecommunication Science and Astronomy or something like that. I’d have to go back to look at my notes, but it changed. CRPL today is the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences which is part of NTIA. There’s a whole lot of other stuff that went in during that period. Anyway. The good news was I came back here. I don’t want to get into politics here too much, but a Democrat took over. A guy by the name of Henry Geller took over at that old Office of Telecommunication Policy. It was called something different at that point. He remembered me and asked if I would come back and give him advice. I did. I ran their policy shop under him. Henry Geller was running it. My point is I’ve been very fortunate in my career, up until recently, and it’s gotten a little bit worse, but communications policy was not particularly partisan. I indeed worked for both Democrats and Republicans during this space, and everybody got along pretty well. Most of us kind of wanted more competition. We wanted to find spectrum to be able to stimulate innovation and so forth. There wasn’t this animosity that unfortunately we sometime find today. I’m fiercely independent which has enabled me to work for both groups. Anyway, that is how I got back to D.C.
Atkinson:
You [Laughing] went from the FCC back to the labs and then back to the FCC.
Hatfield:
No actually it was to NITA. Yes, what now is the NTIA. Yes, I went back. [Laughing] Then in 2007, Bill Canard took over as the Chairman of the FCC and he says, well I kind of remember this Hatfield guy, you know, [Laughing]? Would you come back and be my chief technologist and then chief engineer. I went back to D.C. Actually, I moved back to D.C. from 1997 to 2000 and worked for Bill Canard, another wonderful, wonderful man and mentor. I worked for him, but I consider him very much my mentor That got me back in the FCC between 1997 and 2000. I left there in 2000.
IEEE
Atkinson:
I’m beginning to wonder a little bit about your relationship with the IEEE during your successive years. Maybe you joined IEEE back in college or…?
Hatfield:
Oh, yes. If I could show my mess down here. I try to read every, and still to this day, try to read the IEEE publications. I’ve spoken at and participated in a lot of different IEEE events. It’s sort of the gold standard in terms of keeping up with the field. It was critical to me then from a learning standpoint, but also it was critical in terms of speaking engagements and participating in IEEE. I’m a big supporter, probably even more so than ever, now that we’re facing such rapid changes. I don’t see how you could get along in this field without being heavily involved in the in the IEEE,
Atkinson:
Is your grade a Life Senior member by chance?
Hatfield:
I knew you were going to ask me that. I’m sort of embarrassed. I never went through the process of whatever you need to do. I am a Senior Member or something, I don’t know what it is, exactly. Unfortunately, like I say, I didn’t pursue it. My proof is here, like I say, stacked beside me, all the IEEE publications that I still receive.
Atkinson:
I’m sure because of your age, you are an IEEE Life Member, but the question is whether you’re a Life Senior Member.
Hatfield:
No, I don’t think so.
Atkinson:
In order to be a Life Member, you have to be sixty-five years of age.
Hatfield:
I can check that one off. [Laughing]
Atkinson:
If you achieved that and I sort of think that you probably have, that would make you a Life Member.
Hatfield:
Yes, I think I am a Life Member because I get the newsletter which has the history column in it right? Then isn’t that where the history column is? Where do I read the history column?
Atkinson:
I’m not sure which one. There are two publications that I know of. There’s the Life Members Committee that issues a newsletter multiple times per year.
Hatfield:
Yes.
Atkinson:
Then the History Committee which is a separate committee of the IEEE.
Hatfield:
Okay.
Atkinson:
They have a newsletter that they issue occasionally, talking about all types of history related to all facets of IEEE fields of interest.
Hatfield:
I see. It would include power engineering and things like that.
Atkinson:
It would include power and things like that. It really includes the gamut across the board, but of course, the typical focus is on items that are related to electrical engineering. That includes power, telecommunications, and so forth.
Hatfield:
Yes, I remember the old IRE, right, before the merger. [Laughing]
Atkinson:
IRE and AIEE, or whatever it was. [Laughing]
Hatfield:
Yes. Yes. Indeed.
Atkinson:
The only question that remains probably is whether you’re a Senior Member. You’re certainly qualified for a Senior Member, but it is a grade level that you apply for.
Hatfield:
Yes.
Atkinson:
Yes, and, and if you become a Senior Member, then you are eligible to become an IEEE Fellow.
Hatfield:
Ah.
Atkinson:
If you can get the support to be privileged to go up to that new level.
Hatfield:
Yes. In some ways, I’m so interested in what’s going on today and being still involved in a lot of it that it’s kind of hard to stop and do the things that you should have done professionally. I am a member of the Radio Club of America, the Wireless History Hall of Fame, and some of those sort of things. Like I say, I want to keep the mind going by keeping involved in these policy issues of the day.
Atkinson:
What would you say are the key policy issues of the day?
Hatfield:
Oh, the big one is obviously that we’re running out of spectrum. We have all these wonderful new things we can do, but when you’re talking about billions of IoT devices, you’re talking about still rapid growth. You’re talking about bandwidth consuming. We’re talking about before in the old days I used CW. What was it 3 kilohertz or 1 kilohertz or 2 [Laughing] of bandwidth? Now we have services that demand huge amounts. We’ve got military uses. We just can’t let down our national defense. We have national security issues. We have public safety issues. Trying to fit in all the people. Just yesterday, I was in a meeting regarding radio astronomy. Radio astronomy, you don’t think about it very much, but it really is in passive sensing and is really important to weather forecasting and a whole bunch of other things. These radio astronomers, there’s a lot of value in being able to collect that data. Where are they going to fit? What priority should we give everybody? When you play in this game, you know everybody’s use is priority. The hams say our use: we have this wide system and we’re survivable if you need it. The police say, oh my goodness, we’ve got to have local law enforcement. Anyway, spectrum congestion is one.
The other thing is that we’ve never regulated receivers. Well, that’s not true exactly, but it’s essentially true. We found out, to our chagrin, that receivers consume. We don’t think about it, but if you have a 100-megahertz channel and I’m receiving over 200 megahertz, then I’m getting interference from way outside my own allocation or my own assignment. We’ve got to do something more with receivers, so receivers get better, so I’m involved in that.
The other thing that fits back to what I was saying is pollution of the radio spectrum. All these devices generate a certain amount of interference and noise. I’m very concerned about the pollution of the resource. I sometimes jokingly say that the FCC is sort of like the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. The EPA protects water and air, and the FCC’s basic responsibility is to protect radio spectrum. I’m worried. I’m worried about the pollution of this precious resource. Then there’s a whole lot of really intriguing software defined radio, it’s all this sort of stuff that’s going on today, dynamic spectrum.
In the old days everybody would get their own slice of spectrum, exclusively. Mostly exclusive or many times exclusive. Today we can’t do that. You’ve got to share. We’ve got to figure out a way the radio astronomers can use it when somebody is shut down, for example to make a measurement and then wait and when things are quiet again, make another measure. We’ve got to do time sharing: a better job of time sharing, frequency sharing, and spatial sharing to fit everybody in. That’s the big thing right now is spectrum sharing. I still serve on the FCC’s Technological Advisory Committee and also the Commerce Department’s Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee. These are formal advisory committees to the FCC and to NTIA. Those are the big sort of issues that we’re struggling with in those advisory committees
Atkinson:
Have you had the opportunity to sit in or participate in any of the international policy type of activities?
Hatfield:
The answer is not directly. I’ve been part of the home team when the people are in Geneva or wherever at ITU meetings or World Radio Conference meetings and so forth. I’ve not done that. But I have been fortunate that I have taught all over the world and have a lot of contacts, and a lot of the conversations of course, is in spectrum management. I sound like I’m apologetic and I have a lot of experience, but I’ve never been to a World Radio Conference although a good friend and colleague of mine, Anna Gomez, has just been appointed to be the U.S., I guess, U.S. Ambassador to the upcoming World Radio Conference.
Atkinson:
Okay. I want to explore a little bit with you a couple of things related to space communications and radio astronomy. The new thrust by NASA is into optical laser communication so I thought I’d get your thoughts on those topics.
Hatfield:
If I was a young person and starting out, and I recently gave this advice, I would look at space law because once you’re having passenger [Laughing] flights, then you’ve got the same sort of who gets bumped [Laughing] if they cancel your flight. I’m joking of course, but there is a whole new structure of law that they’re talking about like mining meteorite materials and stuff like this. Well, who owns it? There’s this whole body of law. It’s just an intriguing field. Like I say, I wish I was young because I think I would head into that 3-dimensional space of beyond spectrum management but including spectrum management, but more importantly a space policy. The debris problem which you’re aware of. You mentioned lasers of course. That’s one of the solutions to spectrum congestion. We’ve always moved up in frequency. Light is just another form of electromagnetic [Laughing] radiation, so you can kind of stretch it. But using light for inter-satellite communications and so forth is something.
If I could tell a story. I was involved as a very junior person in some of the first through-the-atmosphere laser communications experience between Table Mountain which is just out my window here and Pikes Peak and a site up here at the labs nine miles away. We observed how the light signal would be spread as it went through the atmosphere and what sort of signal noise ratios you could get in the light waves. Light wave is something that’s always interested me. As you know, we’re moving up to higher in frequency in all the millimeter waves and then more recently even above that where you have lots of spectrum, but the radio wave doesn’t go very far. Using that, I would have something very close to me, a very broad band signal, a very, very broad band, but the signal wouldn’t travel very far. But for a lot of the applications, we’re talking about today, maybe it doesn’t (need to). Here again, it goes back to systems problems. How do you integrate when you need large bandwidth, but the signal doesn’t go very far? Well, it’s a situation where you have not so much bandwidth, but the signal goes far away. How do you tie those together? Of course, that’s what our manufacturers and our carriers are struggling with. Did I answer your question, or did I avoid it?
Atkinson:
I was interested in the space communications because it seems like we’re getting more and more involved in space and space travel and space objects like the New Horizon Spacecraft that flew by Pluto. We can communicate with those devices out there in deep space and all. It seems like that’s an interesting area to get into because NASA, as I understand it, is starting to move away from government owned systems to privately provided systems.
Hatfield:
Well, yes, and there’s questions when, too, a Chinese system and a U.S. system land on the moon. Who coordinates the frequencies? Who figures out who gets to operate on what channel? We’re back to the early days of radio when there was sort of chaos and led to the creation of the Federal Radio Commission back in, what, the 1920s? But it’s the frontier now.
Anita Longley and the Longley-Rice model
Atkinson:
On another topic, I would like to get back to talking a little bit more about Anita Longley and the Longley-Rice model.
Hatfield:
Sure.
Atkinson:
I’d like to hear more about your particular involvement in that, and in any of that research or processes.
Hatfield:
As I indicated a little bit before, they hired me here at the labs for this Navy program called SS-267. We’ve gone back into the archives, and I wish we’d have found more information about the final report and so forth. Basically, what was going on was that, like today, the Navy was trying to optimize its communication structure in a time when there was quite a bit of changes going on. Just for example, there were forms of communication I mentioned once I think meteor scatter, there were all these different radio systems that the Navy was using. I’m, again, so old that the communications path between Hawaii and Annapolis, Maryland were huge, big HF antennas. The Navy was still very much dependent upon radio. The project was involving radio propagation because the better your radio propagation models were, the more reliable you can make your system. They were sort of doing this big study of radio through this SS-267 program.
When I got to the labs, one of the people who was doing radio propagation was Anita Longley and, like I say, Phil Rice. It was in that context that I got to know her and admire her so much. Let’s be frank about it. In those days, women often weren’t given all the credit that they were due. In fact, even to this day, on occasion, I have heard somebody that didn’t realize that the Longley-Rice model, which is sort of the famous model here, that Longley was a woman. They kind of assume it’s a man which is kind of tragic. That’s the reason I think the IEEE and so forth, we’ve got going to try to remember better her legacy.
One of the major things you had to do is develop propagation models. If I remember correctly, there were two versions of the model. There was a point-to-point model and an area model. I have some stuff here that if you dig deep enough, you can still find parts of the model still in existence. It was in that context that I worked with worked with her and her and Phil. I remember her clearly in different instances. One of the problems, by the way, here again I’m all over the map, but one of the problems you have in dealing with scientific people at the labs was they had a project that they were particularly interested in, so if you come in and say I want to do this, they’re really enthusiastic if it fits [Laughing] what their research interests are. If it doesn’t, then it’s kind of like pulling teeth. Fortunately, in Anita’s case it was very much in what we’d say, was in her wheelhouse. She was heavily involved in the development of that Longley-Rice model.
Atkinson:
Where did she do most of her work?
Hatfield:
Oh, where?
Atkinson:
Yes.
Hatfield:
Here at the labs.
Atkinson:
In Boulder?
Hatfield:
She was Canadian. She was a Canadian citizen. I believe that’s correct. Some of these things need to be checked, but she was a Canadian. She was a Canadian citizen as I recall.
Atkinson:
Yes.
Hatfield:
She did the work right here. In fact, if I stood up, I could almost see the lab buildings where she did the work.
Atkinson:
An interesting thing about her work that I might mention is that during the early 1960s I was in Japan, and I was a communications officer in the Air Force there. We worked with Japan or the Pacific Tropospheric Scatter.
Hatfield:
Ah, tropospheric, yes, there you go. There you go.
Atkinson:
I have personal experience in dealing with the tropospheric scatter concepts of long-haul communications back and forth between Hawaii and Japan, and Japan and Okinawa, and Korea and so forth. I was there during that that phase and had some experiences in the management of that tropospheric system over there. I find that the technology of bouncing the waves off of the troposphere or wherever, is a very, very interesting topic.
Hatfield:
It is, indeed. Indeed.
Atkinson:
I find that looking into some of the information on her work is very, very informative and interesting to look at.
Atkinson:
Of course, as I think you are aware, the IEEE is pondering making an IEEE Milestone of the Longley-Rice model.
Hatfield:
Yes.
Atkinson:
It’s one of the reasons why they particularly wanted your particular view of that particular research that she was involved in doing, as well as Rice in that respect.
Hatfield:
It’s been critical for the development of a cellular system from when we were doing cellular, trying to figure out what’s your repeating pattern is from cell to cell. That’s all interference. Controlling the interference between the different cell sites. All that of course relies on propagation models.
Atkinson:
In my career, one of the interesting things is I went to an IEEE conference in Philadelphia. I believe the year was 1976. Up to that point in time I thought RF communications was pretty much maxed out. There was a paper on the structure of the cellphone network. I’m thinking, oh my goodness, this is opening up a whole new world.
Hatfield:
Yes.
Atkinson:
I’ve been able to experience the development of the cellphone network from the beginning to where we are today. Interesting topics as well for sure.
Hatfield:
Yes. My sort of lightbulb lighting moment came when you’re looking at an exponential growth in wireless devices and demand and you needed something that’s exponential to be able to go with that. Of course, when you divide the radius of a cell in half, you multiply the capacity by four. You needed something. That’s, of course, the pressure that led to small cells, and now today, of course, we’ve got picocells and so forth. Very small cells. The reason for which is that’s the way I can get more capacity by us not transmitting very far, so I don’t interfere with people so we can share within this place where I’m living. We can share spectrum through frequency reuse. If you’ve got exponential growth, you need something that can try to catch up with it. Two ways: one, go higher in frequency, but the other fundamentally is to cut down the radius.
Atkinson:
We’ve covered pretty much the gamut of a lot of these items here. From your early upbringing to your interest in technology and pursuing your education along the lines of technology and more specifically radio communications I will probably say.
Hatfield:
Yes. I’m associated so much with radio, but also the net neutrality. Of course, I was involved in the writing of the AT&T antitrust case, so there’s a lot of other parts of my career, but I’m still kind of a radio guy as you can tell.
The other thing, by the way, in my career that I look back on is right after the wall fell in Berlin. I was asked by a bunch of different State Department -- so I traveled all through central and eastern Europe at the time, right after the wall came down. In fact, one of my most emotional things was when I was in Hungary.
Basically, my job was to try to help them make the transition to a market economy. The Russian troops left Hungary. When the last Russian troops left Hungary, they had a big celebration. Because I was an American and there at the time, I was hugged [Laughing] spontaneously on the trip. Then I did work all throughout central and eastern Europe which was, here again, one of the real high points of my career. Unfortunately, there’s some pretty bad challenges now, but that was sort of a very euphoric period. I got to work in almost all the countries in central and eastern Europe.
Atkinson:
Did you?
Hatfield:
I was also able to work in Africa later. I did a lot of work in Africa. There again, doing the same sorts of activities.
Atkinson:
Do you have any interesting stories that you would like to put on this history of things, unusual things that you may have experienced and run across in your career.
Hatfield:
I hadn’t thought about that.
I certainly had very interesting personal experiences through working with people. For example, I worked extensively in South Africa. In Apartheid days, they had different tiers of society. They were black, colored, and white. The black universities were put way out in the countryside because they figured oftentimes that uprisings occur around college campuses. They were afraid that would happen. I got to travel to all the remote areas in in South Africa. Here again, talking about making the conversion, doing a little bit more towards the market economy, but also training people in the policy aspects of what we’ve been talking about. How do you build a nation and a good national communications network? That was a particularly rewarding time of my career. Also, I did quite a bit of work in Southeast Asia. I did quite a bit of work in Laos and that was really interesting. Here again, it was on the sort of policy side of opening up markets and having a more… Oftentimes as you know in those days, the cellular carrier, for example, would be a monopoly of the government. Opening it up and having competitors to get the innovation that you get out of a competitive market was what we were about. That was a particularly wonderful part of my career personally.
Atkinson:
After you and your wife worked at the FCC together, what was her career like, or did she just become a housewife? I’m also wondering did you have any children?
Hatfield:
Yes. We have two surviving children. She came back and wanted to be and was an anthropologist and did some work there. Later she thought her calling was really in nursing. She went through a junior college program for people who wanted to become nurses. Unfortunately, she was afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s Disease or ALS which is a fatal disease. It’s neurological. In engineering terms, the connector between your nerve and the muscle gets broken, so even though the muscle is still there you can’t move it because the connector is unconnected. That’s probably the way that I put it in an engineer’s terms. She’s currently still very, very active, but mostly in terms of helping other people with the disease and so forth.
Atkinson:
And your children?
Hatfield:
One is working for T-Mobile [Laughing].
Hatfield:
The other son, he’s kind of in the consulting business, but in construction. He did a lot of construction management and found that his real calling is as a consultant to people who are doing real estate stuff. Fortunately, they’re here in town. Then I have grandchildren and beyond that.
Atkinson:
Do you know anything about the New Horizon Spacecraft Project?
Hatfield:
I’m sorry?
Atkinson:
Do you know anything about the New Horizon Spacecraft Project?
Hatfield:
No, but I need maybe a little bit more context.
Atkinson:
Southwest Research Institute, which is headquartered here in San Antonio, has an office in Boulder. Out of that office in Boulder, they manage the project for the NASA New Horizons Spacecraft Project. I had the privilege of going up there and meeting Alan Stern who was the fellow who basically managed that whole project for NASA. He wrote a really interesting book called Chasing New Horizons. I got him to sign my copy of it when I was up there. I just wondered if you had any kind of a relationship with that Southwest Research office there in Boulder.
Hatfield:
No. Although we were just on a call yesterday, literally with the NASA folks going back to the spectrum. You don’t think about it, but they’re an enormous consumer of radio spectrum which we talked about is growing in scarcity. Of course, here at the University of Colorado, we have a really strong aerospace department. I’m sure there’s some connections there I don’t recall myself. What was the name of the person?
Atkinson:
Alan Stern. He’s an employee of Southwest Research Institute.
Hatfield:
Okay.
Atkinson:
He’s kind of like the lead investigator for various projects. The one that of course got him all the notoriety was the New Horizons Spacecraft Project. I have some personal familiarity with some of the folks at Southwest Research Institute. That is what made me away of that particular program.
Hatfield:
Maybe you could send me an email giving me the contact information because there’s a tremendous group here of people who have similar interests in that. I’d be really interested in meeting him if he’d be willing and had the time.
Atkinson:
One maybe last tidbit that I’ll say about myself is I worked at NASA on the Apollo communications subsystem here at the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center. I had that privilege of working on that, so I got really interested in space communications as a result of all of these things. I have given a presentation. It’s kind of an overview of space communications. I have given it to an IEEE meeting. Those are my particular interests and why I ask questions about your involvement and interest in those space communications topics.
Hatfield:
Please, send me a copy if you would. I would love to look at it. By the way, that’s another intersection. In the early days of radio propagation, you know that there’s an eleven-year solar cycle which controls how much ionization there is for HF communications. One of the related things is that when the sun produces these big solar flares, it can disrupt communications but moreover if you’re outside, if you’re on the moon, outside, you need to get back under cover essentially because of that radiation. One of the things that I was involved in here during the early space stuff was trying to forecast when there would be an event like that. If I recall right, even airliners and stuff come down in altitude a little bit to get away from that solar radiation that cause an electromagnetic storm. Of course, it disrupted communications. Our paths may have crossed a little bit someplace [Laughing] from that because of the impact of the solar activity on space communications.
[Laughter]
Closing remarks
Atkinson:
Anything else you want to include?
Hatfield:
No. Of course, I’m a storyteller, so I could tell lots and lots of stories. Just as a trivial example, I happened to be in Chicago when the first cellular telephone was installed. It was in a Mercedes, a big Mercedes.
There was a technician who was – now you know those were before bag phones even, but they did fit. The technician had a drill. I could just see it… All these people were standing around, the press and so forth, watching this historical occasion. I am not too inept at doing things with my hands. I could just, in my mind, I felt so sorry for him because I could just see that drill going across [Laughing] the dashboard of this car and (leaving) this enormous scratch. Fortunately, he didn’t. But the historical significance of it was that it was the first cellular phone installed in a phone (sic). Then we had the bag phones where you carried them on the seat beside you. Then Marty Cooper, of course. Eventually then the handheld cellular phones came along then after that.
Anyway, I’ve got a million of those great stories.
Atkinson:
Well maybe we’ll capture some of those at a different point in time.
Atkinson:
This is it. This is your opportunity to say any last words.
Hatfield:
Well, no, I just thank you so much for two things. One, doing the oral history, and secondly, thanks so much for your activities regarding Anita Longley because that is such an overlooked thing that it needs to be corrected. I am very, very, very appreciative of both you and --
Atkinson:
The [IEEE] Communications Society are the folks that are sponsoring and supporting the IEEE Milestone award for the Longley-Rice model.
Hatfield:
Great.
Atkinson:
Now we’re up into the gigahertz.
Hatfield:
Yes, gigahertz, exactly.
Atkinson:
I’m thinking, how can they go any higher, but they always seem to do it.
Hatfield:
Yes, they seem to do it. Yes. We’re up to what 300 gigahertz now and 275 gigahertz I think is the upper limit on what the Commission, the FCC, has allocations for.
Atkinson:
All right. I guess we’ll close. You’ll get a copy of the video and also the IEEE History Committee [the IEEE History Center] will transcribe it and put it in their archives. It will become one of the oral histories on their website where they list all of the oral histories. If you go and look at that list today, you’ll see and recognize probably all the names on that list right on down the line of key people who have been involved in the development of communications and also the Communications Society. Take a look at that, if you get a chance.
Hatfield:
Right. Wonderful. That’s great. I sure will. I’m very honored that you chose to interview me.
Atkinson:
It’s our honor and our privilege. Thank you very, very much for agreeing to do this. I look forward to hearing more of you as time goes on.
Hatfield:
That’s great.
Atkinson:
Okay. Take care.
Hatfield:
Take care now.
