
FCC bans radios that haven't been certified for non-amateur bands - Lucky225
https://medium.com/@lucky225/fcc-back-peddles-all-transceivers-capable-of-transmitting-on-frequencies-that-require-40377a3722c5
======
Animats
The trouble is this thing: "BaoFeng BF-F8HP (UV-5R 3rd Gen) 8-Watt Dual Band
Two-Way Radio (136-174Mhz VHF & 400-520Mhz UHF) Includes Full Kit"[1] This
cheap radio is sold as a "ham radio", and requires a ham license. Large
numbers of non-hams are using it in the GMRS service at higher power levels
than allowed. It's popular with "preppers", even though it's not very rugged,
is complicated to use, tends not to put out as much power as claimed, and the
battery tends to come loose.[2] The FCC's concern is that it allows 8 watt
blithering over a wide range of frequencies by people with no clue how to use
it properly. There are GMRS radios made for hunters which are much more
suitable for wilderness use - waterproof and easy to use.[3]

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MAULSOK](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MAULSOK)

[2]
[https://offgridsurvival.com/baofenguv5rv2review/](https://offgridsurvival.com/baofenguv5rv2review/)

[3]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004PGM9PO/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004PGM9PO/)

~~~
lightlyused
I really don't think the wide transmit range is a problem, the real issue is
that the transmitters are dirty, they have unacceptable spurious emissions:
[https://imgur.com/a/up2ne](https://imgur.com/a/up2ne).

~~~
jjoonathan
Yep, the harmonics are bad, and the start-up transients are pretty spectacular
too:

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/VbB1L4xJ8eSi88WU7](https://photos.app.goo.gl/VbB1L4xJ8eSi88WU7)
(30dB power attenuator)

I hope and suspect the truth is "this radio cannot be legally used by a ham
operator without further cleaning it up because it is so dirty" and that this
got morphed into "this radio cannot be legally used by a ham operator because
it isn't certified."

The whole idea of ham certification is to prove that you can take
responsibility for your own radio waves so as to relax the otherwise enormous
regulatory burden on people trying to experiment and innovate on their own. If
the FCC has actually reversed course on this, they are going against not only
a century+ of tradition but the very spirit of the program itself.

~~~
lima
Switzerland has banned them for that exact reason:
[https://www.bakom.admin.ch/bakom/en/homepage/equipments-
and-...](https://www.bakom.admin.ch/bakom/en/homepage/equipments-and-
installations/non-compliant-equipment/mobile-two-way-radio/baofeng-uv-5r.html)

------
lima
This is clearly a misunderstanding of the relevant laws on the part of the
FCC. I have yet to see any HAM radio transceiver that _is not_ capable of
transmitting outside the HAM radio bands - many of them DIY devices with no
certifications whatsoever, which is the whole point of being a HAM radio
operator. This interpretation would outlaw 99% of all HAM radio transceivers.
Of course, it's not legal to actually transmit on anything but the HAM radio
bands, but a HAM radio operator is certainly allowed to operate it on the HAM
radio bands.

HAM radio is a very special kind of spectrum user - other than any other radio
service, there is no requirement for devices to be commercially certified,
with the burden of ensuring safe operation being placed on the operators
rather than the manufacturers (in the early days, most tranceivers were of the
DIY variety). This is why there's a hard technical exam - you have to prove
that you're capable of building and verifying your own transceiver.

At least in Europe, this is codified by law with no room for interpretation,
and I would be quite surprised if it were any different in the US (HAM radio
laws are pretty much the same everywhere thanks to international harmonization
treaties).

That being said: These Baofeng transceivers are a nuisance and the earlier
generations are rightfully banned in multiple countries for having poor output
filters with strong harmonics all over the place - it would _not_ be legal to
operate one of these even on the HAM radio bands, by a HAM radio operator. At
our local HAM radio club, a few members actually added extra filters to theirs
to make them usable.

I'm all for cracking down on the use of these by non-licensed operators, since
it's extremely easy to interfere with legitimate services like weather fax and
emergency service communications, even if you're not actually using their
frequency. Preventing this is exactly the FCCs job.

Source: licensed HAM radio operator

~~~
Stratoscope
Thank you for the excellent analysis.

Just one nitpick for the benefit of any non-hams who are reading this thread
and may wonder: it's usually spelled "ham", not "HAM", as it is just an
ordinary word, not an acronym.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio)

~~~
lima
Shame on me, thanks for pointing it out!

~~~
Stratoscope
Oh gosh, I didn't mean to shame you, it's a common point of confusion. 73! :-)

~~~
lima
In Germany, I'm always the first to point out that it's called "Funkamateur"
and not "Amateurfunker". 73! :-)

------
franga2000
I could maybe understand not allowing non-hams to own such radios - you really
can't trust any random person not to do dumb shit like transmit garbage on
emergency frequencies, but the whole reason ham licenses exist is to prove to
the government that you know how to properly, safely and legally operate a
radio. The FCC has gone too far on this one (they seem to do that a lot...). I
just hope this doesn't get picked up by some moron from the EU. They've
already fucked up our Internet. Please, don't take away my garbage ebay radio
too.

------
femto
It hinges on the interpretation of the word "capable"?

That the hardware can do it doesn't always mean the radio as a system is
"capable" of it. For example, the firmware may contain a list of banned
frequencies or bands. From a commercial perspective, my understanding is that
the FCC is okay with radio hardware being widely tuneable, as long as the end
user never sees the widely tuneable characteristics and has no way to use the
device outside the defined frequencies.

I'm guessing the FCC has yet to grok what "capable" means when it is a non-
proprietary system where there is no manufacturer to act as gatekeeper? My
guess is that the FCC would consider a radio not to be capable if it required
a firmware reflash, or some other major action on a workbench, to transmit in
a band, meaning it is impossible to accidentally change bands or to do so in
the field. Even if the FCC disagreed that firmware can render a radio non-
capable, a bandpass filter, counted as being an integral part of the radio
would do so?

From my listening of the conversation and reading the article, the above is
consistent with what the FCC said, if you use the above defintion of
"capable".

------
ohazi
So this would make it impossoble to sell just about any software defined radio
that can transmit?

~~~
im3w1l
My common sense tells me that it probably depends on ease of doing it.
Consider these scenarios:

It will transmit on non-amateur bands if you...

    
    
        plug it in.
        push a particular button.
        type in a particular password.
        flash the firmware.
        short two pins.
        physically remove a limiter component.
        physically add a limit-override component.
        take a hammer to it and rebuild it from scratch.
    

Somewhere along that scale it will decided to be compliant.

~~~
anticensor
> physically add a limit-override component.

Is this possible at all?

> take a hammer to it and rebuild it from scratch.

That does not count as an adaptation.

~~~
VLM
Maybe 40 years ago toward the end of the CB fad (CB was kinda the boomer
generations version of the current social media fad) vacuum tube medium to
high power external amps were (and still are) a thing for ham radio use and
toward the higher end of the HF frequency range they struggled to achieve 10
dB of gain, at least with simpler designs and cheaper tubes, so stick a simple
low pass filter in the input that rolls off to 10 dB of loss by 11 meters and
you've ruined the amp for illegal CB use while all a technically knowledgeable
ham has to do to operate legally on the ham 10 meter band is short the low
pass filter out with a piece of wire. It depends a bit on your filter
topology, blocking the input can be shorted as per above, whereas filter
elements shorting to ground you'd have to snip one wire. Usually the
advertisements in the magazines would mention obtusely "snip one wire for full
legal coverage" or "solder one wire for reversible full legal coverage".

------
comboy
How about, instead of more regulation, try to enforce existing one? Sure,
there's some man-hours cost but with cheap SDRs it should be pretty simple
especially in places where it's actually causing a problem. Otherwise nothing
will change except for most hardware being imported from less known brands
from China instead of being sold in the US.

------
Mountain_Skies
Does anyone think that the current entry level amateur test might be too easy?
When I was in elementary school I loved the idea of being a ham radio
operator. I checked out books from the county library but found the content
beyond my abilities at that time, especially as they were my one and only
source of help. In my college days I took another look as the tests were
simplified but at the time every license still required a Morse Code test.
With lots of other things going on I dropped the idea.

Recently I looked into it again and took sample tests online. I passed every
one on the first try. My university degree isn't EE but it's in a related
field that required taking a good number of EE courses. Even with that, I
couldn't design a radio to save my life. I might be able to figure it out
relatively quickly with available material online but it strikes me as being a
bit of a mismatch that I likely can easily pass the Technician test while my
practical knowledge of equipment used by amateur operators in that of a black
box. If nothing else, perhaps the bank of questions should be larger. I'm not
good at rote memorization but others are.

Perhaps there is no real problem here but I can't help thinking that maybe
there are a lot of people getting licenses without a real understanding of how
much in the ham world actually operates. I understand the desire to make it
more accessible, especially given the pressure to reassign amateur band to
other uses but is there a risk of becoming CB Radio 2.0?

------
8bitsrule
For several generations, ham gear has never had to 'certified' so long as it
is _known_ to obey the rules ... power, modulation type, non-interference,
etc.... for the band it's being operated in.

OTOH, _if_ a particular amateur does not have the knowledge to _know_ (from
observations) that the gear does not violate the regs, s/he could, of course,
be in violation.

I'd guess that the ARRL will have something to say about this by Monday.

~~~
escherplex
The world has changed. On the one hand you still have FCC 97.315 (on the extra
exam) which permits sale of non-certified HF (sub 2M) amplifiers from amateur
operators to amateur operators, which serves as a convenient loophole for
'homebrews' exchange by individuals with technical competence and presumably a
sense of responsibility. On the other you have Amazon placing no restrictions
on the purchase of BaoFeng UV5R-s at US$ 23 which have wide VHF Tx capacity.
Among other things this supplies individuals, nefarious or otherwise, with the
capacity to jam or transmit false weather reports on NOAA 162 MHz maritime
band (for the hell of it, verified Tx capacity there using a 136-174 MHz
Wouxun KG-689 run into a dummy load). With today's pervasive _laissez faire_
mindset, _measured_ tighter restrictions may be a necessary evil.

~~~
VLM
Since the mid 90s when SAME codes rolled out for NOAA weather radio system,
there's been a constant low level nation wide problem with people transmitting
"funny" SAME codes like hurricane warnings in north dakota and so forth.

It was pretty obvious security issue when the system was released, and the
fake alerts usually make it into the news as "news of the weird" rather than
"OMG someone has hacked the system" type of story. There is no way to "patch"
or fix the system by the nature of its design, all receivers have to trust
that any transmission is genuine.

Obviously cheap radios (SDR?) are just going to make the problem worse until
NOAA alerts are essentially useless. Of course now there's cellphones and
their broadcast emergency messages, so I would not be surprised to see the
NOAA alert system discontinued in a couple years.

Although SAME sounds like a horrible idea, it was well intentioned in that the
radio transmissions can carry 30 to 50 miles so people would ignore all
warnings given that statistically most of the warnings wouldn't apply to them
(sort of like Amber Alert fatigue), so they added all this digital stuff to
specify the exact problem (why?) and exact zip codes (good idea).

~~~
paulie_a
I grew up in a small town, in the 90's it would have cost a couple hundred
dollars to set off the tornado warning system with a 4 digit DTMF code. It
probably hasn't changed since then.

~~~
lima
In many towns in Germany, you can still trigger the sirens using DTMF codes.
Fortunately, everyone forgot about it.

It used to be a problem back when illegal CB radio amplifiers and pirate
broadcast radio were still a thing :-)

~~~
paulie_a
I am sure the equipment hasn't been upgraded or the codes even changed in
decades. And the code was probably 1234.

~~~
lima
Yep

Most equipment uses Selcall:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selcall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selcall)

------
Lucky225
ARRL now in talks with FCC over this: [http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-fcc-
discussing-issue-of-uncert...](http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-fcc-discussing-
issue-of-uncertified-imported-vhf-uhf-transceivers)

------
mbrumlow
How does this affect things like SDRs like the HackRF?

------
tracker1
Between this crap, and forcing wifi vendors to lock everything down,
effectively killing legitimate homebrew, fuck the FCC.

~~~
themodelplumber
As a ham radio operator: It is frustrating to see the FCC do stuff like this.

[https://medium.com/@lucky225/fcc-back-peddles-all-
transceive...](https://medium.com/@lucky225/fcc-back-peddles-all-transceivers-
capable-of-transmitting-on-frequencies-that-require-40377a3722c5)

Why not just stop and think about things for a while, as opposed to running
around making these executive decisions and annoying people like homebrew
operators? Holy smokes. And why not go through back channels, drop some truth
bombs on whoever the really big offenders are, rather than scooping up all
possible babies to throw out with the bathwater?

(Still, I heard from a Russian today that he'd be arrested for taking an HT to
the park even just to listen to whatever's on the air. So it's all in
perspective, but homebrew is huge for innovation.)

~~~
nerdponx
Is there any legitimate reason for this rule?

~~~
themodelplumber
The major part of it is about controlling what happens on the bands. Which to
a degree is a useful function, because the FCC is useful as a sort of arbiter
between various users of those bands. Commercial, public sector, amateur, etc.

However, the recent explosion in popularity of "transmit on whatever band you
please, right out of the box" radios has created a lot of opportunities for
idiots to cause limited havoc on one end, and for the FCC to apparently
extrapolate that to "omg unlimited havoc" on the other.

We'll see how it goes, but there is clearly a lot of B&W (i.e. uneducated or
just non-analytical) thinking on the matter currently.

