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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

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

> 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.

>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.