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Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

Why is the UK (in the unusual company of Yemen and North Korea) an important "do not transmit zone"?

Airborne transmissions of this sort are not legal over the UK, North Korea, or Yemen. Guessing it's a leftover rule from WW2 in the case of the UK, not sure.

These transmitters typically have geofencing routines that turn off the transmission when flying over these countries.

But in my brief attempt to answer my own question I only found pages detailing pico balloon launches from the UK.

I'm sure people in the UK are doing launches, but it's illegal for them to transmit when flying in UK airspace.

In reality, it's an almost unenforcable law to begin with. Most of the WSPR transmissions are on the order of 10mW (probably similar to the Bluetooth output of your cell phone). It's not unusual for these transmissions to be heard several thousand miles away, which is quite amazing!

Yeah unfortunately the uk amateur radio licence (at all levels) prohibits airborne use of the licence.

I know for other amateur balloon experiments such as weather balloons, they often use the ISM bands instead in the UK.

If I remember right is the reason is that it’s illegal do use amateur radio bands on something that is flying, so that excludes APRS. However, using the ISM bands are fine so that’s what people in the UK tend to use, but it means no APRS and you have to have people tracking you in other ways (e.g. sending your telemetry over LoRa or RTTY)

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