Listening isn’t illegal until they make it illegal, though talking is technically only legal on the amateur bands with an amateur license. There’s really no effective way to catch a listener, or almost any talkers, until they’re looking for you.
With accessories and some fiddling, they can also send short bursts of data. Not much, not far.
They won’t listen or talk on (American) CB.
If you’re talking, ‘privacy codes’ (dcs/ctcss) only stop the receiving radio from listening. It’s more like writing a name on a note than hiding it somewhere-anybody in the room can see it if they want.
Effective distance is essentially line of sight.
And yeah, this is nothing the gov doesn’t know, or can’t listen to, or scramble, or jump on just like anybody else with $40 could.
Anyway, it always helps to be informed!
I thought they disabled the license bands? I mean I think you're still able to unlock them with some settings changes. But really, any ham radio can do this
They sell ones for what they call ‘type acceptance’.. for instance legal MURS radios can only have the MURS band with MURS channels. The UV5R is an amateur radio so it can do whatever, and the FCC’s amateur license is supposed to dictate what you do with it.
It’s dumb, like gun laws.
It's like being able to own frequency jammers just not use them
Also worth noting for people..not advocating anything illegal, just saying it's interesting as a techie oriented person in seeing how they work, you know.
Isn’t it neat? The more fascinating the tech, the more stupid the laws governing it have to be. I recall hearing somewhere that in the early days of CB it was (technically?) illegal to talk to someone more than like 200 miles away.