A ham radio operator in Idaho must pay a record $34,000 penalty for causing interference with communications during a fire suppression effort.
A ham radio operator in Idaho must pay a record $34,000 penalty for causing interference with communications during a fire suppression effort.
Everyone in the Amateur Radio community knows that the FCC is fed up with people using frequencies that they don’t have legal access to and as a result they’ve been issuing increasingly harsh penalties over the past few years.
As for whether he was “doing it in good faith”, well, I question that. The guy was trying to get firefighters to protect his radio repeater site and one of the repeaters located there was for his own business. He had a personal financial interest in getting a fire team over there.
I’m an Amateur Radio operator myself and I have limited sympathy for the situation this guy put himself in. The proper course of action was to leave the wildfire area and come back when it was over, not keep making illegal radio transmissions until a fire chief drives over there and tells you to shut the fuck up.
Yeah, outside of say, him radioing that there was a fire team/people trapped in a life-threatening situation in X location, I don’t think there’s almost any situation where abusing the bands is justified.