PLEASE put in comments on this proceeding, everyone! WE NEED YOUR HELP!
* People don't enable DFS and they mess up radar for Airports.
* ~20 reported incidents, people are fined ~$25k and stop.
* Therefore we must make it illegal to change the firmware on wireless devices.
Only 20 cases? $25k fines!? Why can't we continue to solve this problem like this? The hobbyists flashing their devices with OpenWRT and then making a conscious decision to override defaults (upon which OpenWRT will warn you about legality) are a rare breed. Those that foolishly do this are being fined heavily.
I just don't understand the jump.
Given that level of potential downside (even if things would have to happen exactly wrong for it to occur), I'm not sure that "we fine them $25K and they stop" is the right trade-off. I'm not sure that "only 20 reported incidents" is a level that you should expect people to be comfortable with. I'm not sure "we'll continue to not be horribly unlucky" is a valid approach.
The proper way to fix that issue, if there ever was one, was to mandate the implementation of avionics that can't be jammed by a Part 15 device. Instead, look what happened... we got a decade of silly, groundless rules that had no useful effect and were eventually scrapped.
Now it looks like it's the WiFi industry's turn. Gee, maybe putting weather radar right next to an unlicensed ISM band wasn't such a great idea. Maybe they're the ones who should move.
Personally I like the way that we handle people who point lasers at aircraft: find them, throw the book at them pour encourager les autres, and meanwhile don't try to ban f*cking laser pointers.
Yes, it's more important that 299m Americans who don't live beside an airport be able to use that spectrum than some small number of passengers per year that may or may not die in a possible crash that might be caused by wifi interference.
There are so many lower-hanging fruit for safety that this is a non-issue.
Yes, I do not fly, have no interest in flying and could care less if the entire aviation industry went bankrupt. I stopped flying the day the TSA took over the airports.
Freedom is more important to me than Flying.
Doesn't work that way. They're trying to detect air movement. That's hard; it's not possible at just random frequencies. You can't (effectively) move the radars without changing physics. They're at the frequency they're at for a reason, not just because of random bureaucratic decisions.
(Of course, it's not that simple. Of course you can move them - at some loss of effectiveness. How much, to move them how far? I can't answer that.)
Now, who decides what "slightly" and "large" mean in this context? You didn't provide any numbers. Given that 87,000 [1] flights take off and land safely in the US each day and that there have been 20 reported TDWR inference incidents ever, we cannot justify the harm this policy would do to the technology community.
Honestly, if I had to decide between the ability to choose free software, and having all flights grounded indefinitely I would go with the software. I know my opinion is not the majority though.