Party Vibe

FCC only have jurisdiction over the USA (even in the Land of the Geese next door Industrie Canada have autonomy – they follow the FCC closely but sometimes also use CEPT and ETSI guidelines.

CEPT is the Comité Européen des Postes et Télécommunications -which actually has its HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark ;)ETSI is the European Telecommunications Standards institute – who are based in Paris, France.

At one point the PTT and Communications Ministries had separate rules for telecoms equipment that connected to the network with wires or via radio signals which is why there are two standards groups, but they all work closely together.

Europe is small and radio signals do not stop at borders. What CEPT and ETSI do is get the boffins from the Communications Ministries of all 28 countries, those from the telecom companies and the professors who design the equipment to sit round a table to agree frequency allocations (they are not 100% harmonised especially in the UHF and SHF band).

This table is often in Copenhagen although in the late 90s when the 2,4 GHz WLAN channels were agreed Norway supplied the table, in a place called Tromsø. Increasingly the table can turn up in places like Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and Beijing which now follow European rather than US tech standards.

It tends to be in a place near the coast where there are lots of aerodromes. There is a very good reason for this; radio signals used for safety-critical navigation of ships/aircraft and weather monitoring have absolute priority over anything else in the airwaves.

5 GHz WLAN channels are shared with both weather monitoring and aviation radars. There is an international agreement (which CEPT and ETSI worked out in the late 1990s) that WLAN equipment detects the distinctive signal a radar transmitter sends and moves its transmit frequency to a different channel for 10 minutes.

The weather monitoring radar does exactly that. It uses a great deal of electricity and is not keyed up just for the fun of it, to use up the taxpayers money or to send radio signals into peoples brains to control them. The aircraft radar normally only activates when there is particularly rough weather and the air traffic control is not 100% sure where all the aircraft are. Whoever runs it does realise the radio band is shared with a lot of users – it is the same profs who invented it who design the WLAN equipment.

In Europe the weather radar seems to be near the top end of the frequency allocations – your Communications Ministry and/or the Defence ministry will tell you what these are if you ask them. There is nothing secret or dodgy about it.

In most countries there are some channels you can only use indoors and with lower TX power – most buildings have a metal frame solidly bonded to protective earth (earth ground) which is a Faraday Cage – thus the radio signal does not go far into the sky.

The USA allocation does take a bite out of 3 channels as well as demanding the same radar detection as Europe.

It appears that American “hackers” have managed to remove the radar detection code and have probably also turned up the TX power and put a high gain antenna on the end of an access point and cut across the weather radar (which means the same equipment can interfere with navigation radars). So the FAA called the FCC as that is genuinely a dangerous thing to do and asked if this practice can be stopped.

CEPT/ETSI are also considering only permitting ‘compliant’ software to be loaded on to wireless equipment; although it is just as easy to end up on the wrong channels on 5 GHz using the stock firmware if its set to the wrong region/channels. The permitted allocations can change [its more usual for extra channels to be permitted than existing ones taken away].

The same weather radar equipment is used worldwide (often sold by the Americans!)- it is always a bad idea to transmit signals onto a frequency that is already in use especially for anything to do with vehicles, ships or aircraft. It is not a USA specific problem; it does seem that some folk really do have a problem with understanding the concept of shared resources and the public/private sector and individuals working together to use them safely. BTW I had a look on the FCC website myself (which has recently been updated and is a lot easier to use) and they have actually permitted a few more channels to be used this year as long as the equipment ‘listens out’ for radars.

@imPureNote 970719 wrote:

Wow, those photos are so cool! I’m studying to be an electrician and so while I found those sketches you did daunting it still got me excited that i KNEW what i was looking at! :big-joint:.

there is more than one circuit diagram on there; if it is the ones about how to jack electricity from a disused warehouse at the meter cupboard be warned that although the methods shown are safe when done correctly it is likely to get you arrested anywhere in the world – unless maybe its an emergency and you are setting up a refugee shelter (the local electric company in the area I then lived actually let me off several times because they knew I was getting power for homeless folks in winter).

the others are harmless things like a telephone ringing detector and a sound activated switch circuit; they should also work in USA but you might need to substitute the European components/modules for locally available ones (if you want to build either let me know and I can suggest what they should be).

I’ve been reading a lot of CEPT docs recently (ironically to make sure my experiments and demo systems are compliant with the domestic regulations); the Ofcom man actually sent me the links.

This law has to be drafted carefully otherwise it makes other perfectly legitimate equipments illegal. There is a good case for stopping the DFS being altered although that perhaps should be done in hardware rather than software.

For instance I can buy for €25 a two way radio which is as powerful as what cops/special forces had in 1980s. Unlike “ham radios” all the frequencies are wide open to both receive and transmit (unless you lock them down which I have done on most of mine). I also got some others for staff to use which are locked to our licensed frequencies only.

The more powerful model doesn’t have encrypt as standard (it could be added as an external module) although if I wanted to (and could speak Russian or Polish and had arranged this first) I could call up one of the dudes on board any container ship within 20 km to send a taxicab to pick me up and drop me off at Rotterdam.

Provided the captain didn’t mind and I take my UK passport with me I’ve not committed any crime. I expect though old nautical conditions apply where you have to help out with the running of the ship; the weather is rough and although I’d probably find work at NL its either going to be fixing defective marine comms equipment at stupid hours or the tech in elderly homes; so no different from life in Blighty. Might be safer than low cost flights though…

The US legislation does threaten other smaller specialist devices like the circuit modules I used to send the pager messages – as the whole idea of them is they are software defined radio devices that can receive and transmit over a wide range of frequencies – it is left to the common sense of the indivdual user not to use frequencies that is going to upset someone else.