A few years ago I wanted to get a ham radio license to do real time tracking with with a high altitude balloon after seeing tons of amateurs doing it. I couldn't imagine a worse time to do it than now with the Chinese spy balloon nonsense. Even back then they had to label the camera payload box with things like "THIS ISN'T A BOMB please call ###".
I can't recall a prior instance when the FCC (or any other regulator) fined a ham for interfering with amateur radio activities. Pretty cool to see! 73 VE3EQL
Maybe they got lost? That's valid use in EU, but not in US.<p>From Wikipedia:<p>"The upper portion of the band, which is usually used for phone (voice), is sometimes referred to as 75 meters. In Europe, 75m is a shortwave broadcast band, with a number of national radio services operating between 3.9 and 4.0 MHz."<p>"The European 75 m broadcast band overlaps the North American 80 m ham band allocation. When it is night on both ends of the transmission path some broadcasters in Asia and Europe can be heard in North America between 3.9 and 4.0 MHz"
I don't think such a huge fine is justified, how about confiscating his equipment, and banning him from using radio equipment capable of transmitting on amateur frequencies for a period of time?<p>It didn't cause any harm to emergency services, or disrupt anything other than a hobby. Fining him such a large amount for disrupting a hobby is ridiculous. And it makes me want nothing to do with amateur radio, and stick to unlicensed bands only.<p>The guy fined likely has children, a family to raise, which are all much more important than someone's hobby. You cannot impose such financial hardship for essentially what is trolling someone, on the radio. It's ridiculous.<p>Draconian penalties may only encourage miscreants to disrespect amateur radio, in an act of rebellion? And those miscreants might be able to get away with jamming it legally, by using powerline Ethernet adaptors, which will typically cause interference for the whole neighborhood. There's no law saying you can't have a really long piece of electrical wiring in your home, with absolutely nothing connected to it at the end? <a href="http://gm4fvm.blogspot.com/2018/06/power-line-adapter-noise-interference.html" rel="nofollow">http://gm4fvm.blogspot.com/2018/06/power-line-adapter-noise-...</a><p>Maybe we non-amateurs should lobby the government to open up the VHF/UHF amateur bands for unlicensed operation at low power, just like 2.4GHz, and consign this hobby to the dustbin of history? How about getting industry involved in the lobbying as well? Can we find any good commercial use cases for those bands? In Europe we can already use a large part of the 70cm band (433MHz) at low power levels.<p>The radio spectrum is supposed to belong to all of us? Not just a privileged few who possess a license, and are so willing to punish others so excessively for relatively minor infractions?