Radio Penalty Question Please Help

[kb2vxa]

Hi N4 and all,

Never mind all that Act blather, what I didn't mention for the sake of clarity is that the FCC being a commission lacks any law enforcement powers including the collection of fines and imposition of prison time. The phrase in the Act "administrative process" means these actions are taken by an Administrative Law judge.

There is no need to be pedantic and confuse people with the convolutions of law when the point is in my last paragraph and attatched image. As far as Gerritsen and his ilk go the twists and turns the FCC had to go through boggle the best legal minds so can you imagine the scrambled eggs here among we poor paeons?

On the lighter side the SOP is that an NoV (notice of violation) is the first thing that comes in the mail, a simple letter of inquiry. If answered properly and in a timely fashion and no serious infraction is noted it ends there, the FCC has been satisfied. If the respondant tries to weasel out of it with a load of BS or it is ignored things get progressively tougher and NALs aren't so easy to wriggle out of.

Just a footnote on J.G.'s charges, every charge by the FCC is a misdemeanor so that includes transmitting without a license. That's the easy part if you call the total fines easy, the crusher is the federal felony of interfering with a USCG SAR operation. To clarify, he wasn't interfering with a government or military communications system, in fact it was an Amateur 2M repeater being used by the USCG Auxilliary as it was the only reliable system available to them during the rescue operation. The whole thing is ironic, a sure case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Interfering with SoCAL 2M ham repeaters was his favorite game but he didn't care who was using it or what for... OOPS, in over his head in one step.

Bang bang,
they shot him down.
Bang bang,
he hit the ground.
Bang bang,
that awful sound.
Bang bang,
the Coast Guard shot him down.

Maybe Cher will sing it at a prison concert like Johnny Cash?

I hear the FCC comin',
a comin' round the bend,
and I ain't seen the sunlight,
since I don't know when.
I'm suck with Cher in prison,
and she's a makin' me sick....

(;->)

 

[SCPD]

I'm appalled at the responses from Rayjk110 and denseglow.

It this is a ham license then transmitting without the license is illegal and hams have an obligation to police out ranks. If someone messes up and transmits a couple of times after the license expiration then there is probably no harm done but a consistent pattern of such behaviour hurts us all.

Ir204 - you didn't say if it was you or not but whoever it is should rectify the situation.

I'm not trying to start a flame war (though I may have), I just think we don't need to condone illegal transmission or we hurt ourselves. Who want to end up like the CB'ers?

I/m glad you said this. We are often told that the ham bands are to be self-policed which does not mean "non-policed." It is every ham's responsibility to do something. I

In my rural location in the mountains with a nearby ski area I hear illegal activity on 2 meters from time to time. A few times it has been skiers using the 2 meter repeater on top of the mountain the ski area is located on. I stepped in and told the parties transmitting that the repeater would be turned off and I would be using methods to locate their transmitters if it continued. That was enough to stop them.

There are also the non-licensed hang gliders who use ham equipment on simplex to coordinate their ground crews and to talk with others in flight, as well as to chat to each other car to car when coming to the area. On one occasion a local licensed ham and hang glider was using the frequency for hours at a time without identifying with his call sign.

In many of these cases I have transmitted and asked nicely that folks use their call signs in the manner required by the FCC, and I get replies that often include the phrase "you must be some old fart who does not have a life and needs to bother people." There seems to be an attitude of "if you don't get caught it is OK to violate the law" and "go away and leave me alone, there is something wrong with you because you expect everyone to obey the law", and "mind your own business." Just like another post said, if we as individual license holders don't take some action the resulting situation will be like CB or worse, similar to the chaos in southern California caused by illegal transmitters in Mexico causing havoc on public safety, business, and amateur frequencies.

Like another poster said "how do you know if you are bothering someone?" A few years ago I had returned from a large fire in southern California and was getting back to my regular duties on the National Forest in the Sierra I was working on. I then received transmissions on the nearest Forest repeater that sounded like people in several U.S. Forest Service engines talking about some very personal matters and some of it included things that happened on the same fire I had been assigned to. I conclude they were returning from the same fire I was on. I knew that the output frequency of a National Forest quite some distance away was the repeater input frequency for my Forest. I had seen a couple of strike teams from this particular Forest at the fire and upon hearing this personal traffic go on for 45 or more minutes I concluded that these people were talking simplex on their output frequency and just happened to have their external code box switched to the tone of a repeater on our Forest's radio system that is located on the crest of the Sierra and can cover large portions of the Central Valley in California. Like the rest of us, these people had been given instructions not to use their local Forest's frequencies when traveling as they might be allocated to agencies other than the Forest Service in other areas, thus causing serious interference. These people would not have known the interference they were causing on my Forest by locking up a repeater with some very personal traffic, which was broadcast all over my Forest, unless I took some action. Since I was very near the location of the repeater involved, I drove up on the ridge it is located on and dialed in the distant Forest's simplex or repeater output frequency, turned off my external tone box, and transmitted to them in the blind that they were being heard all over my Forest. They did not reply, but the interference on the repeater stopped immediately. I followed up with dispatch later and a memo was sent to fire management on the distant Forest for followup.

My point with this story is that you really don't know what problems you might be causing. A frequency authorized by a license that expired 6 years ago might have been reallocated for use as a repeater input if is in the VHF band where any frequency can be either an output or input. You could be causing problems similar to those I related above.

Before there was an FCC radio was very chaotic and we had relatively few users then. Due to the attitude of many people in Mexico about the law, who purchase amateur and business radios and 1500 watt amplifiers in places like El Paso and Brownsville and take them back across the border where they won't get caught, chaos is resulting in much of the area of CA, AZ, NM, and TX on almost all frequencies. The FCC's lack of a budget for enforcement is causing some chaos on business frequencies, especially those used in "mail order" radios. Those that have invested in GMRS repeaters are having their use of them adversely affected by little kids and others playing around with radios purchased "mail order" or at a big box store. Those of us who are aware of how radios work, who make it a hobby, and like to increase our awareness of radio by reading and posting to this site should be professional and support legal use of the airwaves. We should not condone or make snide comments about not hurting anything or chastising the ham who gets on the air in an attempt to keep the amateur bands clean. Like mkh's comment we should be appalled.