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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

There's a LOT of testing done, before you can sell a device, including TX power measurement.

And yes, they have vans roving the streets looking for illegal transmissions.

Ha. My friend and I had the FCC van roving our neighborhood looking for us once, back in the late 70s. A guy with a CB base station dropped a dime on us, cause we were playing with our 0.1 watt walkie talkies near his house. The guy that sold us the handhelds said “what channel crystal do you want, how about 9?” and we said sure; we didn’t know that 9 is the emergency CB channel and the law prevents its use for, for example, playing hide and seek as a 13 year old.

Of all of those hypothetical "if you could go back in time" situations, I'd want to go back and rat that guy out for selling kids that crystal.

Just the other day in another thread there was the conversation about mischievous people doing things, and that pretty much sounds like what that guy was doing. He got the best of both worlds knowing he was going to cause some chaos but none of the repercussions of it.

I bet he had had that crystal on the shelf for a long time and he kept trying to sell it.

47 CFR 95.931(a)(2):"CBRS Channel 9 may be used only for emergency communications or traveler assistance. It must not be used for any other purpose."

Since the goal of hide and seek is to get home (before found) I’d call that traveler assistance. <grin>

> And yes, they have vans roving the streets looking for illegal transmissions.

Only and when they receive complaints. Then they have to decide if it is serious enough to care. This is a far cry different than active BBC patrols.

I clearly stated until people notice and complain. It's like these words were totally ignored.

To be fair, there are a lot of people in the FPV drone community using 600mW+ 5ghz transmitters for analog video without HAM licenses, and I don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting in trouble for it. But that's typically in unpopulated areas.

Also, they are gone before anyone can triangulate them.

Not for all devices and they're not even particularly good at catching sellers who should provide testing data and register but don't.

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