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I wonder how long the same gear will be sold with ham band only and a lil software patch to go back to normal.

Also frankly the effort is kinda wasted, "breaching" on other bands was never hard and with availability of cheap SDRs, easier than ever.

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That's already how it works today. A lot of Chinese radios can either be switched by a key press combo or flashed with alternative firmware.

It might not even be that much depending on what it is. For example, Baofeng radios would have TX in bands they shouldn't have until the FCC cracked down on them coming in.

So they started selling them restricted to ham bands until the user pressed a key combo to factory reset them, which put them back to iirc 136-172.

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