On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 10:20:42PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
> At 11:59 PM 11/15/2002 -0500, Dave Emery wrote:
> > And I am on record as advising some of the folks doing gnu-radio
> >that in my personal opinion it was rather unlikely that a user
> >programmable open source software radio would ever get FCC approval or
> >be legally sold in the USA under current regulations on scanning radio
> >receivers.
>
> No FCC approval should be required. GNURadio is not a RADIO but an
> extensible toolkit of signal processing software for building test
> instruments. Test instruments are essentially unregulated by the FCC. See
> for yourself by checking out the regulatory compliance section a spectrum
> analyzer or signal generator from HP or Tektronix.
This probably will work as long as software is not sold with
hardware as a complete integrated package and as long as neither is
marketed as a scanning radio receiver or a kit to make one. But the
FCC looks very dimly on attempts to market "test equipment" that is
really an otherwise banned scanner and they have pushed a couple
of such products off the market.
There is very little doubt that the gnuradio package has lots of
applicablity to test equipment use and to various kinds of measurement
and calibration requirements in real radio systems as well as use in R&D
simulating and analyzing radio systems. And clearly hams can use it as
they wish for ham projects. And perhaps someone will come up with a
sufficiently closed and secured application to pass FCC muster for use
in a real radio system sold to the general public - but likely that
would have to be more or less a sealed box (like Linux in Tivo units)
which could not be user altered or added to and might well have to
include digital signatures or other mechanisms to ensure this.
Of course I probably have an axe to grind here as a collector
and user of test equipment and related professional electronics of
various sorts - I'd sure as hell not like to see private ownership or
purchase or sale of such licensed, regulated or even banned. And there
already was one such attempt by the cellular industry to persuade the
FCC to restrict private ownership of certain RF test equipment back in
the late 90s which fortunately the ham community was able to persuade
the FCC was foolish and would damage the ability of hams to serve the
country in times of emergency. Had the FCC gone along with the cellular
industry proposals, virtually all rf test equipment such as spectrum
analyzers, modulation meters, service monitors, signal generators,
network analyzers, protocol analyzers, microwave counters, test and
measurement receivers and the like and perhaps even things like certain
logic analyzers and scopes would have become controlled items that could
only be bought or sold by communications carriers and companies making
or servicing equipment for them or government and military agencies.
Private sale oe ownership would have been banned, and might even have
become a crime.
As it was finally resolved, the FCC ruled that as long as test
equipment was not marketed to the general public it could be bought,
sold, used and possessed by members of the public - especially hams -
without any restrictions on what an individual could buy or own. But
in the NPRM the FCC made quite clear that if someone was trying to
sell otherwise banned or unapproved electronics to the general public
as "test equipment" they would take action.
>
> steve
--
Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass.
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18
