Lots of interesting discussion here, but let's cut to the real question:
1. Since people are still going to find a way to buy items the FCC doesn't want them to have, what's that new outlet going to be? I saw somebody mention TikTok. OK... what else? Facebook groups? Craigslist? Private old-skool phpbb forums? Usenet? Mastodon? AliExpress? Something that hasn't been invented yet?
I always found the difference between ham radio operators and computer hacker community interesting.
There is obvious large overlap. Both are nerdy and techy and attract similar base groups. But the ham space is dominated by people who want to be "good citizens" through collective action, while computer hacker is more about cyberpunk "if I could do it, then it's allowed".
Perhaps it's the clearest example of "The medium is the message" concept.
It is very strange that when you come across anything radio related, people seemingly come out of the woodwork to tell you not that you are necessarily, actively doing something against regulation, but that there is always potential to be breaking the law.
The subject is mostly academic, but in 18 comments no less than 3 different people are warning about doing something against the rules. It's weird. I don't know of any other subject that provokes responses about "the rules" like this.
I could understand if the article title was "How to Aim Laser Pointers at Airplanes", but attach a long enough wire to an oscillator and people start to get uppity.
On the other side of things, I don't know if you've turned on a shortwave radio recently, but the only thing I hear on mine is switch-mode power supply noise.
I see this in basically every interesting domain now, from construction to software development to 3D printing to starting a business. There’s a huge cohort that’s always ready to jump on other people for doing something interesting, offering “friendly” discouragement at the earliest moment, often while simultaneously defending bad behavior from incumbents or their half of the political class.
I think it might be because ham radio is still barely legal and the community wants to keep the few freedoms they have so they try not to piss off any groups of interest. Whereas pretty much everything hacking-related is already a felony thanks to DMCA and other similar laws, so they don't have much to lose.
almost, but not quite ... the difference between those is that the stereotypical ham radio enthusiast is obsessed with following regulations and laws to the T. while the stereotypical hacker is all about gray zones, loop holes and questioning rules.
To be fair, HAMs are typically empowered by actual telecommunications agencies with legislative authority to enter premises and what have you to resolve issues, whereas script kiddies just make up their own shit.
RF usage is governed by the FCC. Amateur Radio exists at the mercy of the government, and if there is widespread abuse or careless operation by amateur radio operators then that will likely jeopardize the continued existence of amateur radio.
Why is eBay acting as the FCC? I can still buy lasers that will rip through your retina in the blink of a eye from eBay (lol). The equipment is completely legal to own and operate, and transmit with the proper licensing (which is not required to purchase said equipment).
Because these companies have large legal departments essentially in charge of minimizing regulatory and reputational risk. It's the same reason they've been progressively cracking down on firearm accessories, BB guns, knives, fireworks, laboratory chemicals, erotica, pill presses, and a bunch of other things over the past 20 years. All of that is legal but makes lawyers and PR people queasy. It's not just marketplaces, Paypal has asinine rules on what you can and cannot pay for. So does Google Pay, Zelle, Venmo, and so on.
I don't think it's useful to point out inconsistencies; the bottom line is that lasers will be on the chopping block within our lifetime too.
You can't buy firearms parts or tooling on eBay in the UK because quite frankly if you're a gunsmith you're probably not buying stuff on eBay, and it's unlikely that anyone who isn't a qualified gunsmith is buying them for anything legit. Similarly, there are age restrictions on buying bladed items, just as there are on buying bladed items in shops. Turns out that all those 13-year-olds buying 14" butcher knives weren't actually filleting venison with them, who would have thought it?
Yer cheapy Chinese radios though? Baofengs are currently about £19 each on eBay, with a discount for quantity.
Because the FCC is puppeting Ebay through regulation, the author is deliberately painting this as evil large corporation because I assume
that gets more clicks, the real title would be "FCC Enacts Rule Restricting Sale of Radio Equipment, Marketplaces Like Ebay Forced to Pull Listings."
> Protecting Against National Security Threats to the Communications Supply Chain…
Yeah… a foreign adversary is totally going to be thwarted by FCC certification. The Russian's are probably just kicking themselves for buying at Walmart.
The purpose of the restriction is to keep people from using hacked baofengs to chat on bands a) they're not allowed to use unlicensed b) could potentially already be in use by another service eg EMS/fire/police.
The big problem used to be that people would buy unlocked Baofengs and accidentally use them on licensed services thinking there were generic walkie talkies. The current locked down rules prevent that. They can still get amateur handhelds and use without ham license, but hams police that. It is also easier to get FRS/GMRS handhelds for pubic use, many the same models reprogrammed.
Unlocking handhelds is less of a problem because it requires deliberate action to break the rules. There are fewer people willing and able to do that.
There are older UV-5R Baofengs that are in demand because they didn't have the software restriction that newer ones have. It's not that they're hacked, it's that they were not locked from the factory
Are newer baofengs locked down? I thought you can still just hold down 3 buttons while power cycling the radio to unlock TX from 400 to 520 MHz.
Regardless, the Quansheng UV-K5 is largely supplanting the Baofeng as the go-to entry level HT, the 3rd party firmware for that radio is pretty impressive.
Licensed US amateur operator here. In general the FCC regulations allow you to listen on whatever frequencies you like, EXCEPT the cellular frequencies (This dates back to the analog era, before cellular traffic was encrypted).
Some jurisdictions may also have restrictions on, for example, using a police scanner in a vehicle, that would restrict listening (even though most of that traffic is now also encrypted).
Don't quote me on this, but I believe there's some more nuance to the cellular band issue. What's restricted, AFAIK, isn't simply receiving traffic on those frequencies in and of itself, but:
1. Decrypting those communications if they are encrypted
and
2. Selling equipment designed to receive on those bands.
Of course there's not much purpose in sitting around listening to the digital chirping noises of encrypted traffic, but as I understand it, if that's your hobby, that part is actually legal.
(Also a licensed US ham, not not an expert in anything in particular and definitely not a lawyer)
Doesn't meshtastic operate in the unlicensed bands? Would that mean they're blocked? The article says they're only blocking devices that need FCC certification and since meshtastic is unlicensed it doesn't need FCC certification as far as I know.
The band it's operating in doesn't change whether or not it needs FCC certification. wifi operating on 2.4ghz is an unlicensed band, but it still needs certification for instance.
IIRC, Meshtastic has an is_licensed / “Ham Mode” setting that changes the software's regulatory assumptions and power limits so it can be used.
not trying to be controversial here; but isn't it weird that you can buy semi automatic guns and there's restrictions on radio equipments bc these equipments can mess with the bandwidth used by public services - but similar arguments hold for guns as well.
There's a smell about this so close to the US election.
It sounds like someone is worried about people buying personal radios for Meshtastic or LoRa to use in case cell phone service doesn't work at protests, or there is unrest if the election results are called into question by the current political establishment that doesn't want to cede power. So they got eBay to roll over and more companies could follow.
Ordinarily I wouldn't take a conspiracy theory like this seriously. But in these times, corruption is so rampant that the most convoluted answer tends to be the right one.
Given that the underlying motivation here isn't merely regulation, but rather some arbitrary diktat from the regime for which enforcement will be gradually cranked up (physical reality, logic, and Constitutional rights be damned), the real question is what the overall eventual scope is here, in other words what it makes sense for hobbyists/DIYers to stock up on before the destructionists are able to fully strangle it.
Definitely - LoRA/Meshtastic, SDR transmitters, cheap prepper radios that technically require a license to use, maybe even just cheap antennas that you could make yourself but would rather not have to?
Maybe - ESP32, nRF and other competitively-priced wifi/2.4Ghz microcontrollers/devboards if the China Bad marketing chant really ramps up here? Especially with the recent AI-facilitated reverse engineering to gain SDR-ish functionality. Might have to worry about receive-only SDRs too, since it's not like these people really know the difference.
That's what I can think of off the top of my head, but I've never been heavily into RF. Anything else?
The upshot is there's been an incredible reduction in the amount of utter crap listed when searching for ham radio gear. Instead of countless pages of Baofengs and all manner of accessories, I can actually find some gear.
When I first saw this shared on the ham radio email reflectors, I went to eBay to have a look. I was actually enticed to buy a radio I hadn't seen or considered prior. That posting is only visible now that the noise floor has dropped dramatically.
RIP all those human person made wideband low noise amplifier boards that cost $5. Now I'll have to buy a $50 minicircuits or whatever alternative with an FCC ID. Despite the fact that I'd only use the LNA for receive, it still could generate and amplifies RF not in the ham bands. So they'll certainly be banned. :\
eBay simply does not have employees with the domain/technical knowledge to decide which things actually require an FCC ID to be displayed. As such they'll just ban anything and everything re: RF, like the example above.
The FCC document from page 97 on has these tables full of extremely inaccurate ass-covering data pretending that >80% of all electronics sellers that might be effected by these new FCC rules are large firms (>1000 people) and that's simply not true. If they counted ebay sellers there'd be more human sellers than firms by far.
That's the trivially easy part. The hard part is convincing potential buyers and sellers that most participants are legit and not trying to scam people.
It might not even be that much depending on what it is. For example, Baofeng radios would have TX in bands they shouldn't have until the FCC cracked down on them coming in.
So they started selling them restricted to ham bands until the user pressed a key combo to factory reset them, which put them back to iirc 136-172.
eBay makes waaaay too much skimming 10% off every test gear purchase to be closed minded about this, and in any case they have FCC IDs so they aren't under immediate threat.
Ah, yes, that pesky FCC for regulating a public shared frequency spectrum. Im sure everybody will just behave in a vacuum of rules and wouldnt possibly do anything bad.
1. Since people are still going to find a way to buy items the FCC doesn't want them to have, what's that new outlet going to be? I saw somebody mention TikTok. OK... what else? Facebook groups? Craigslist? Private old-skool phpbb forums? Usenet? Mastodon? AliExpress? Something that hasn't been invented yet?
There is obvious large overlap. Both are nerdy and techy and attract similar base groups. But the ham space is dominated by people who want to be "good citizens" through collective action, while computer hacker is more about cyberpunk "if I could do it, then it's allowed".
Perhaps it's the clearest example of "The medium is the message" concept.
Take this Hackaday article from the other day:
https://hackaday.com/2026/10/15/so-you-want-to-make-your-sdr...
The subject is mostly academic, but in 18 comments no less than 3 different people are warning about doing something against the rules. It's weird. I don't know of any other subject that provokes responses about "the rules" like this. I could understand if the article title was "How to Aim Laser Pointers at Airplanes", but attach a long enough wire to an oscillator and people start to get uppity.
On the other side of things, I don't know if you've turned on a shortwave radio recently, but the only thing I hear on mine is switch-mode power supply noise.
I don't think it's useful to point out inconsistencies; the bottom line is that lasers will be on the chopping block within our lifetime too.
Yer cheapy Chinese radios though? Baofengs are currently about £19 each on eBay, with a discount for quantity.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-strengthen-rul...
> Protecting Against National Security Threats to the Communications Supply Chain…
Yeah… a foreign adversary is totally going to be thwarted by FCC certification. The Russian's are probably just kicking themselves for buying at Walmart.
If they’re pushing eBay not to allow the sale of devices which allow transmitting on illegal bands, is that really puppeting?
Or is that just saying “stop helping people do illegal shit or we’re going to have to start investigating you”?
Unlocking handhelds is less of a problem because it requires deliberate action to break the rules. There are fewer people willing and able to do that.
Regardless, the Quansheng UV-K5 is largely supplanting the Baofeng as the go-to entry level HT, the 3rd party firmware for that radio is pretty impressive.
Are modern varieties truly locked or just “locked ;)” ?
1. Decrypting those communications if they are encrypted
and
2. Selling equipment designed to receive on those bands.
Of course there's not much purpose in sitting around listening to the digital chirping noises of encrypted traffic, but as I understand it, if that's your hobby, that part is actually legal.
(Also a licensed US ham, not not an expert in anything in particular and definitely not a lawyer)
https://meshtastic.org/docs/legal/
IIRC, Meshtastic has an is_licensed / “Ham Mode” setting that changes the software's regulatory assumptions and power limits so it can be used.
And also for some reason explicitly lists „military aircraft and ships“. Which surely should be allowed just for the comedic value.
But my memory is hazy from time and limited direct interest.
It sounds like someone is worried about people buying personal radios for Meshtastic or LoRa to use in case cell phone service doesn't work at protests, or there is unrest if the election results are called into question by the current political establishment that doesn't want to cede power. So they got eBay to roll over and more companies could follow.
Ordinarily I wouldn't take a conspiracy theory like this seriously. But in these times, corruption is so rampant that the most convoluted answer tends to be the right one.
Edit: as another commenter pointed out devices with an FCC ID will be fine (for now) which I assume covers these. And you can always DIY a frequency converter: https://hackaday.com/2026/10/15/so-you-want-to-make-your-sdr...
> new policy will not apply to gear that operates exclusively on amateur radio frequencies
So almost everything is getting banned, at least the existing hardware.
I believe the FCC ban doesn't apply to used gear but seems like eBay is taking a harder stance.
Definitely - LoRA/Meshtastic, SDR transmitters, cheap prepper radios that technically require a license to use, maybe even just cheap antennas that you could make yourself but would rather not have to?
Maybe - ESP32, nRF and other competitively-priced wifi/2.4Ghz microcontrollers/devboards if the China Bad marketing chant really ramps up here? Especially with the recent AI-facilitated reverse engineering to gain SDR-ish functionality. Might have to worry about receive-only SDRs too, since it's not like these people really know the difference.
That's what I can think of off the top of my head, but I've never been heavily into RF. Anything else?
When I first saw this shared on the ham radio email reflectors, I went to eBay to have a look. I was actually enticed to buy a radio I hadn't seen or considered prior. That posting is only visible now that the noise floor has dropped dramatically.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/amazon-uk-now-requires-p...
eBay simply does not have employees with the domain/technical knowledge to decide which things actually require an FCC ID to be displayed. As such they'll just ban anything and everything re: RF, like the example above.
The FCC document from page 97 on has these tables full of extremely inaccurate ass-covering data pretending that >80% of all electronics sellers that might be effected by these new FCC rules are large firms (>1000 people) and that's simply not true. If they counted ebay sellers there'd be more human sellers than firms by far.
Also frankly the effort is kinda wasted, "breaching" on other bands was never hard and with availability of cheap SDRs, easier than ever.
So they started selling them restricted to ham bands until the user pressed a key combo to factory reset them, which put them back to iirc 136-172.
It seems to work okay over here in the UK.