The beautiful complexity of the US radio spectrum

Somewhere above you right now, a plane is broadcasting its coordinates on 1090 megahertz. A satellite high above Earth is transmitting weather maps on 1694.1 MHz. On top of all that, every single phone and Wi-Fi router near you blasts internet traffic through the air over radio waves. A carefully regulated radio spectrum is what makes it possible for these signals to get to the right place intact. The Federal Communication Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) share the task of managing radio frequencies for US airwaves. The NTIA manages all federal radio uses (including military use), while the FCC manages everything else. It is an incredibly complex system, and to help with the job of explaining the importance of managing this invisible natural resource, the NTIA publishes the United States Frequency Allocation Chart (which you can order as a wall chart for $6). The chart uses 33 color-coded categories to visualize the information in a crazy quilt of blocks (some wide, some narrow), spread from 9 kHz (very low frequency) all the way to 300 GHz (extremely high frequency). It does suffer from scale distortions, not unlike a map of Earth.