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Comment by jamescun | Hacker News Reader

I'm based in the UK and have a passive interest in amateur radio. If I had to guess, it isn't outright forbidden, just a licensed activity. Maybe the license isn't easy to get or widely granted?

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Obtaining an amateur radio licence in the UK is fairly trivial. The courses and exams are administered by volunteers so the hardest part is finding availability to align with your schedule. COVID really helped because it became possible to take the exams online.

There are 3 levels, Foundation through to Full which come with different privileges. You can achieve a lot with the basic Foundation.

In terms of airborne transmitting - yes the UK is an outlier. It is forbidden to make amateur radio transmissions in the air over the UK, or use a UK licence to do so anywhere I think. The key word here is amateur - so specifically on those bands and with that licence. I think the ISM bands would be fine - and there are balloon projects and clubs in the UK.

I have a Finnish amateur licence in parallel and that doesn't have this restriction but naturally it would still not be allowed to use it to transmit from an aircraft over the UK. And even if it were to be elsewhere there are still some rules surrounding that, and it's hopefully obvious that you need permission of whoever's in charge of the aircraft.

Transmission outside of unlicensed bands requires a license, amateur radio has a license requirement to teach responsibility and proper clue, which isn't a bad thing per se

you have to have a license to watch television for chris' sake, so it absolutely falls in line you'd need licensing to transmit. you probably have to have licenses in your kid's walkie-talkies. this is the same country that has the national power grid introduce "hum" (or whatever it is technically callled) in the signal so that a time reference can be decoded from it.

> this is the same country that has the national power grid introduce "hum" (or whatever it is technically callled) in the signal so that a time reference can be decoded from it.

I don't think that's intentionally introduced. My understanding was that mains hum in any grid is an artifact of a noisy signal that just happens to be useful as a forensics fingerprint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_hum

Yes, it seems I crossed a few streams in my head. Here's an article[0] talking about how the forensics is done because someone is creating a database of all of the fluctuations that give it the forensic finger print rather than it being deliberately injected.

[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-20629671

Fascinating

I believe that the frequency actually is deliberately managed... to keep old clocks synced.

https://www.kccscientific.com/the-dirty-little-secret-about-...

Its not really a license as much as it is a fee, even if it is called that. It'd be like calling taxes a life-license or something. Also worth noting its not the only country that has one, just off the top of my head I know that Ireland, Switzerland and Japan have them as well

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