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FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

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Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#81

Post by anilakar »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #61
jimktrains2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the us you're allowed to receive everything but the cellular phone spectrum without a license. You or the device needs to be licensed to transmit, however. Note that this isn't the case everywhere. I believe in the uk it's illegal to listen to air traffic, but I would need to look up the specifics to give anymore detail.

Receiving of certain bands is prohibited, from memory the ones used on cordless phones and something else. All devices sold, say frequency analyzers, have to have a bandgap for them to pass FCC validation. It is common to remove these bandgaps and ignore the law because everyone seems to accept they are really dumb and they wreck the sensitivity of the instrument.

The bandstop filter requirement is mostly a stopgap measure from an analog era when cell phones were basically trunked FM radio systems. That limitation serves no purpose nowadays.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#82

Post by anilakar »

ridaj wrote: post #16

It's somewhat surprising for a radio amateur group to take it upon themselves to complain to the FCC about interference to a whole bunch of infrastructure-critical systems like satellite positioning, air traffic control, etc. Sounds a bit like spectrum vigilantism to me. Or was there actual harm done to these systems? You'd hope that if it was really critical there'd be more investigations by the government vs waitin…

Someone dumps their garbage on your front yard. You hop in your car, follow them and find out that they're running a large-scale illegal garbage dumping business. You call the cops and report both crimes. Are you a "vigilante" now?

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#83

Post by nucleardog »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #29
duskwuff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IIRC these switches were not user accessible. They were definitely user accessible in at least some of the products. Here are a couple of the devices named in the FCC complaint which obviously had exposed DIP switches: https://hobbyking.com/en_us/aomway-700tvl-cmos-hd-camera-nts... https://hobbyking.com/en_us/1-2ghz-mg-500mw-8ch-a-v-wireless... https://hobbyking.com/en_us/x40-l-25mw-tx-cnc-alloy-cas.html There were…

I still don't feel great about this. It should be up to the end user to not break the law.

It's just not realistic to enforce at scale.

As an example of this, look at the explosion of cheap handheld radios that can operate across all different parts of the spectrum flooding in from China, enforcement has been... more or less non-existent except in the most egregious of cases. Generally the range on these things is only a few miles, and trying to pinpoint a single intermittent transmission even if it's static within that few miles can be _extremely_ time consuming.

And we're talking about a very limited shared resource that we rely on for many aspects of day-to-day life.

Where it _is_ possible to enforce at scale is at importation/sale.

Yes, any random yahoo can get the parts to put together an illegal transmitter. But the scale of that problem is a hell of a lot different than a product being mass marketed online for $50 with no indication that it's illegal to operate.

The simple fact is if the market gets flooded with cheap devices that don't follow the spectrum allocations, large swathes of the spectrum will very quickly become useless. It's pretty a straightforward example of the tragedy of the commons.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#84

Post by himinlomax »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #29
duskwuff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IIRC these switches were not user accessible. They were definitely user accessible in at least some of the products. Here are a couple of the devices named in the FCC complaint which obviously had exposed DIP switches: https://hobbyking.com/en_us/aomway-700tvl-cmos-hd-camera-nts... https://hobbyking.com/en_us/1-2ghz-mg-500mw-8ch-a-v-wireless... https://hobbyking.com/en_us/x40-l-25mw-tx-cnc-alloy-cas.html There were…

I still don't feel great about this. It should be up to the end user to not break the law.

Even if you're a hardcore libertarian, you have to be somewhat pragmatic here. The freedom to do whatever the fuck you want is nice, but being able to board a flight without fearing that it could be endangered by any random fuckwit who doesn't know what they're doing is a bit nicer. While it's not that hard to cobble together some electronics that would have the same effect, this is about limiting it happening because some idiots flipped the wrong switch, or making it just hard enough to stop most evildoers who would do it on purpose from actually doing it.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#85

Post by himinlomax »

Robotbeat wrote: post #41
R0b0t1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't feel great about this. It should be up to the end user to not break the law.

I agree. Is SDR gonna be made illegal? Same idea.

TX SDR is already illegal, unless you have the appropriate license. If you don't stop the sale of cheap illegal transmission devices, there will be millions of instance of illegal transmission, most unintentional, which would make enforcement impossible and ruin the spectrum.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#86

Post by function_seven »

serf wrote: post #80
oceanghost wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just jogged a weird memory out of my head. In the early days of the internet there were sites that had pirate audio streams from analog cell phones. It was pretty sporadic but a very interesting sort of slice of life thing.

I used to watch analog TV streams that were being reroadcast on the ShoutCast network years and years ago. It's a strange thing to see white-snow-static redigitized and then drop bit-rates.

> It's a strange thing to see white-snow-static redigitized and then drop bit-rates.

Old-school white snow static is theoretically the most uncompressable thing, right? So some poor encoder is being told to "send this at 384kb!" and it just throws its little robot hands up and says, "fine, here's your super blocky bullshit. I'm going on break..."

Or something like that?

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#87

Post by underwater »

salawat wrote: post #58
rthomas6 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPS signals from the satellites are extremely weak, and actually are below the noise floor. GPS uses processing gain tricks in order to see the signals at all. This means that a terrestrial based transmitter doesn't have to put out a ton of power to break GPS in a large area. Like, many square miles. It makes sense to me to outlaw the sale of RF electronics that are made to transmit on that frequency. Usually I would…

>but it's sort of like selling a laser pointer with a user-accessible switch that would make it a powerful directed energy weapon. ...I see no problem with this. In fact, I'll take 5.

You're proving his point?

People will buy this with the intent of misusing it, therefore the government should stop people selling it.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#88

Post by tzs »

vel0city wrote: post #59
desine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, you’re not allowed to “operate” on bands you’re not licensed for, including rx, but enforcement is difficult, of course. Edit: If your device has any transmit ability, it falls under above. If your device ONLY has rx capability, it does not. Many of the USB SDR dongles DO have the capability to tx, albeit at only ~0.5 watts. This is generally not advertised in the device, but their chip does technically…

This is incorrect at least in the US. You are allowed to receive practically everything. There's only really a carve out for analog cellphone frequencies, but that's about it.

That’s under federal law. A few states add some restrictions. 5 of them disallow listening to police frequencies on portable radios without a license (but a ham license is acceptable). Florida and New York are the biggest states with this restriction.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#89

Post by djmips »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #35
homero wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then people would buy phone jammers if they could easily be sold

Kits are already easy to buy. People don't bother buying the kits because if you use the jammer generally you are found. Occasionally pops up in the news.

" if you use the jammer generally you are found. Occasionally pops up in the news." - only people who are found pop up in the news. Your logic looks faulty.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#90

Post by djmips »

bombcar wrote: post #38
wrs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an official complaint to the appropriate government enforcement agency is the exact opposite of “vigilantism”. Vigilantism would be hams deliberately crashing the drones with jammers, or something.

Hams have done just that - famously chasing the Russian woodpecker iirc off of frequencies they wanted to use.

For those curious I located the relevant wiki information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar#Jamming_the_Woodpec....

There is no reference to the jamming being successful however.

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