Motorola said Aug. 7 its geolocation device operated successfully in the Federal Communications Commission's ongoing white spaces field trials. White spaces are the unused interference buffer spaces between digital television channels that a number of tech companies want to use to deliver unlicensed broadband services.

The spectrum between the channels will become available after Feb. 17 when broadcasters make the switch to digital broadcasting. The FCC began testing white spaces devices with mixed results in January using a prototype device supplied by Microsoft. In July, the agency moved the tests outdoors using devices from Motorola, Philips, Adaptrum and InfoComm International.

"It worked as well as we said it would," said Steve Sharkey, Motorola's senior director of regulatory and spectrum policy. "It went really well."

Motorola's device was the only one using both geolocation and sensing technologies, while devices from Philips, Adaptrum and InfoComm relied only on sensing to detect existing TV channels. Motorola primarily relied on combining geolocation with an FCC database of channels to find spectrum in the white spaces that would not interfere with existing TV channels.

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