What’s stopping another person/company from transmitting on the same radio frequency as an established radio channel?
In: Technology
For most people the combination „required skillset to do this“ and „be smart enough to NOT do it if you could“ are enough.
The rest gets educated by the fines attached to doing so.
Story:
Worked for a company that designed and commissioned systems on ships. We had a component that was designed to transmit _occasionally some_ messages over UHF (or was it VHF?). That’s a spectrum that you are legally allowed to use, but not to block permanently. The component was misconfigured and did transmit constantly instead of „occasionally“.
The channel being blocked impeded on vessel operations (maneuver coordination e.g. dropping anchor and throwing lines) of ferries in a berth in the vicinity.
The error must have happened late one evening – by late morning next day there was a white van with antennas coming to our berth. I believe the fine was in the mid- 10.000€ range.
Even though it was clearly an unintentional mistake.
Bottom line: don’t do stupid things. Or just FAFO.
Just to clarify: the consequences will SIGNIFICANTLY depend on what frequencies you mess around on:
Is it specifically licensed to someone (e.g. cell phone operator) or in use for something of general relevance (e.g. air traffic control / police etc) OR is it free to be used by public under certain conditions (see story) OR is it free without conditions
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