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Comment by alnwlsn | Hacker News Reader

It is very strange that when you come across anything radio related, people seemingly come out of the woodwork to tell you not that you are necessarily, actively doing something against regulation, but that there is always potential to be breaking the law.

Take this Hackaday article from the other day:

https://hackaday.com/2026/10/15/so-you-want-to-make-your-sdr...

The subject is mostly academic, but in 18 comments no less than 3 different people are warning about doing something against the rules. It's weird. I don't know of any other subject that provokes responses about "the rules" like this. I could understand if the article title was "How to Aim Laser Pointers at Airplanes", but attach a long enough wire to an oscillator and people start to get uppity.

On the other side of things, I don't know if you've turned on a shortwave radio recently, but the only thing I hear on mine is switch-mode power supply noise.

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Hams take pride in being largely self-policing because this is one of the things that keeps the FCC interested in reserving sections of the spectrum for ham use.

Also, I love hackaday for their articles but the comment section there is among the worst on the Internet. You'll find more enlightening discussions on the wall of a truckstop bathroom stall.

> comment section there is among the worst on the Internet

Some would argue it's right up there with HN ;)

Oh but HN is so much more interesting to watch. Recently someone built an app to find property near public lands, and to watch an infantanlized, largely urban population be pendanticly confused at an ungoverned existence.. its like having an ant farm.

I got the Technician license mid 2026 as a genuine ignoramus and super newb. I crammed hard for the test (might have been wise to go for General) but operating in the VHF/UHF (repeater) landscape, I lost much of my initial enthusiasm. Not much going in the handheld realm (HF is where it's at), though the discipline, etiquette and kindness is admirable, and clearly, the hobby tends to draw a particular type of person. I might buy a GMRS license too, which requires no test, can be useful, and is far less formal than Ham.

Not in the budget yet for HF gear, though I do have an RTL-SDR Blog (Rx only) I need to figure out.

As a former trucker; the form of enlightenment one acquires between those walls is limited, and mostly, a dissertation on the virtues of breatharianism and kumbhaka.

Like I said, "The medium is the message"

One bad transmitter in your neighborhood can cut you off from the hobby. Someone who's into linux and computers can follow an online tutorial to rig together an SDR. Look at a bunch of numbers or static, shrug and move on to a different project without disconnecting that anttena breaking an entire band for all of his neighbors. Then it's on those neighbors to go build a directional antenna and buy portable radio gear and then do their own "in the field investigation" to isolate which house is doing that, then go try to explain to the random person they are polluting a band and hope the person is friendly and cooperative.

In a perfect world the FCC would do that, but getting the FCC to act on small infractions like that is a slow and long process and often goes unanswered. Especially if you're not near a marina or a federal building or an airport. So one hackaday reader can take down ham operation in an entire area because they were just interested in a weekend DIY project.

People throw that "against the law" to limit the damage. But actually getting the FCC to prosecute these issues is a challenge in itself.

You have to really egregiously fuck up as an ordinary consumer/non professional to get the FCC to expend the resources to hunt you down and fine you. One example that comes to mind is a guy who continually operated a cellular jammer from his car on his daily commute on a freeway in Florida.

The FCC's enforcement bureau is not very large or well resourced and is primarily concerned with issuing enforcement actions on licensed broadcasters. You can look at their public documents/listings of "Notes of Appparent Liability" for examples. Everyone who gets fined by the FCC is public recod.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=FCC+enfor...

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=FCC+NAL+n...

True. Local ham chapters hold celebration events when they finally get the FCC to take action on something.

The FCC used to be a lot more active in the 40s and 50s. Especially when there was a general hysteria and fear of soviet spies. The FCC still has various monitoring station everywhere, but they only use them for huge operations rather than policing hobby bands.

$48K fine? Owch! Wonder why he was doing it? Got pissed off at people talking/texting while driving maybe?

Edit: ok, a reddit user said that was the reason.

Seems like FCC enforcement occurred because traffic enforcement was lacking, leaving everyone less safe as a result.

Hands free speakerphones are legal most places and it is questionable whether they are worse than talking to a passenger.

They went after Hal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVZVhfbgCsw

I listened to a net on a VHF repeater once- some guy's PTT button got stuck, which ties up the repeater, plus you hear the background sounds from his house. It was quite funny- FCC not needed, instead somebody called him (you heard his phone ring and him saying "What?!" over the repeater).

Yeah, at a local net someone once fell asleep on their PTT key :'D

>without disconnecting that anttena breaking an entire band for all of his neighbors

Why can't those neighbors just broadcast on top of it? I'm sure an LLM could figure out a protocol that could survive.

There are power regulations. You can't simply broadcast a more powerful signal. And that also only makes the problem worse for everyone else, it immediately turns into a room of people shouting over each other and nothing actually being communicated.

And you cannot simply switch bands, because amateur bands are very specific.

You're left with attempting some form of recoverable signal modulation which can propagate through the problem area, but it becomes akin to making ripples in a turbulent river. The ripples simply do not contain the energy to resist diffusion of the surrounding heat in the environment for any considerable length of time. We definitely have techniques for propagating multiple signals across the same frequency band, it's fundamental to modern communication, but it still comes with physical limitations.

first of all, you can only broadcast "on top" of something if you're using an AM mode, and even then who wants to be talking through a spurious signal? Would you wanna have random voices or other sounds played over a phone call, interrupting conversation?

Why are you rationalizing / defending categorically anti-social behavior?

> Would you wanna have random voices or other sounds played over a phone call, interrupting conversation?

For the younger readers: this used to be a not uncommon thing in the POTS era, "lines crossed". And it was indeed annoying, especially if it persisted after hanging up and calling again.

>Would you wanna have random voices

Why would there be? Do you get random voices on a VoIP call done over wifi (radio) or there is interference? It sounds like your protocol needs more work.

This isn't a trunked system and encryption is illegal

Plus keep in mind you're just broadcasting everywhere. It's like a giant lightbulb on top of your house that's super bright in all directions.

WiFi interference also totally is a thing in apartment buildings and overcrowding of the spectrum really can make your latency and throughout lower

>This isn't a trunked system

Then make it one.

>encryption is illegal

It's not illegal and is a core part of modern radio protocols.

> It's not illegal and is a core part of modern radio protocols.

LOL, yes it's for most practical purposes on hobby ham bands.

If you wanna be pedantic about it, the FCC rules for ham operations doesn't mention encryption, it mentions encoding instead [0]. So yes, if you encrypt or encode without obscuring the meaning (by publishing your encoding spec or encryption keys) then yes you can "encrypt". digital mode radio works that way.

[0] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...

Is that how packet radio works ?

packet radio is never encrypted, and always uses a public protocol, yes

Yes pretty much. There are a lot of digital modes for different use cases. Usually packet radio is referring to APRS. You can encode all you want as long as you make the encoding/decoding spec public and as long as the decoded information still comply with the rest of the rules like no commercial use, no profanity, call sign announcement, etc.

most equipment doesn't use trunked protocols like DMR, because it's vastly more expensive, and more difficult to use that honest-to-goodness analogue radio.

Plus, the hypothetical we're discussing here is that some non-ham asshole left a spurious transmitter running. Do you think that a trunked magically protects people from interference? No.

Finally, yes, encryption is illegal to use on ham radio.

I honestly blame QFT. Like it should have considered this when coming up with the electromagnetic field because as it stands, it’s completely broken. I hope some frontier lab is working on a QFT 2.0 with some LLMs to address the current limitations with the various fields.

I saw a video recently about someone doing home automation work, put some transmitter in his basement, and all his neighbours' car key fobs stopped working because his transmitter was overwhelming them. It's hard to think of some LLM solution for that.

> I saw a video recently about someone doing home automation work, put some transmitter in his basement, and all his neighbours' car key fobs stopped working because his transmitter was overwhelming them. It's hard to think of some LLM solution for that.

Faraday cages?

That's akin to a music recording studio not soundproofing their walls.

> Someone who's into linux and computers can follow an online tutorial to rig together an SDR. Look at a bunch of numbers or static, shrug and move on to a different project without disconnecting that anttena breaking an entire band for all of his neighbors.

Why would someone leave an SDR actively transmitting with no purpose?

For the edgy luls. To trigger the normies. etc.

I see this in basically every interesting domain now, from construction to software development to 3D printing to starting a business. There’s a huge cohort that’s always ready to jump on other people for doing something interesting, offering “friendly” discouragement at the earliest moment, often while simultaneously defending bad behavior from incumbents or their half of the political class.

I'm wonder if it's an extension of internet reddit culture where you get rewarded with instant updopamines for making some snappy technically-correct point so we all learned to do that.

That’s probably one of the main drivers, especially on forums with votes/reputation systems.

"The radio spectrum is a fragile resource". That's the first thing they tell you in the licensing class in my country. So this care is more about keeping a fragile common resource working well, rather then trying to pose as law-abiding.

that may be, and you're right that they're building highways but this is part of a broader power grab on the second amendment.

don't forget that they just banned 'content' by disallowing foreign flir on drones, which is the modern equivalent to a periscope.

they are putting enough satellites in orbit to track everyone all at once roughly.

this is over reach.

this is why i am nervous about 'small government', they're not going to give up ground and will remain 'big data'. it is a tax and a restriction on freedoms of press, of arms, of speech, of movement, of assembly, of association.

where's the redress and representation?

it is a human right to build an emergency transmitter out of barbed wire, not a data center right of way to filter process and categorize.

Simple, the blast radius of anything radio related is much, much higher. And if you mess around with transmitters so that they interfere with air or maritime bands or with police/firefighter/EMS comms, it might be the one hole in the swiss cheese too much that leads to a fatal disaster.

Unfortunately, it is at the same time very easy to make innocent mistakes that lead to such kinds of emissions. Say, forget (or mess up) the input filter of a PA, and at the same time mess up the output filter... and whoops, now you're blasting harmonics all over the place.

I think it's mostly fear that bad actors will make government take that little bit of freedom that they are enjoying

Eh, it1.'s not really fear.

The spectrum is fragile. A few people being assholes can mess it up for thousands or millions of people with a few hundred bucks of equipment.

While you or me may not cause a mess, there are millions and millions of people around and eventually you hit the random number generator where people fuck things up.

A lot of railfans are the same way. I think there's a aspect of on the spectrum style nerds who are really into rule following

Add to that the hall room monitor effect and also the fact that the stakes are rather high for hams (look at what happened to CB radio)

I don't think it's about enforcing the rules (on Hacker News), as much about sharing information that others may not know.

> in 18 comments no less than 3 different people are warning about doing something against the rules

I don't know how it is in your country but where I grew up it's well-known that the cops will come knock at your door fast if you transmit at power or frequency bands you shouldn't be transmitting.

Short story: if you piss off other spectrum holders enough, amateur radio operators will lose the leeway they get with the service including the self policing aspect.

Also, when you break little rules early (like low power transmission out of band) it makes you desensitized to breaking dangerous rules later (like keeping people away from antennas being driven with high power).

I suppose it has something to do with RF being a shared medium.

I mean everything kinda is, but with RF it is very evident.

Maybe the world would be better off if we realized that most commons are like that and should be treated with more common sense

You could try jaywalking in Germany

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