GNU Radio and the Law
Do I need a FCC license?
Hi, guys. I’m a newbie.
I’m planning to buy some USRPs and start learning gnu radio. By the way, somebody told me that I need a license from FCC to use gnu radio. And he said that getting a license is not the manufacturer’s duty but mine. Is this true? Do you guys have licenses?
If you’re using USRP for receiving, no licensing is required. But if you’re using it for transmitting in the amateur-radio bands, then you’ll definitely need to get yourself an amateur-radio license. If you’re using it for transmitting in bands other than amateur-radio, then the rules become much more complicated. In the U.S., any devices must be type-accepted (certified by the FCC) in order to transmit anywhere other than the amateur-radio bands. In many of those non-amateur-radio bands, you’ll also need a seperate “user” license.
Matt Ettus’s USRP is sold as test equipment, and given the low level (I believe 10 or 100 mW of RF is the highest emission from any of the current daughter cards from Matt) this is not a concern IMHO without the usage of high gain antenna or power amplification.
FCC broadcast flag?
The nice thing about GNU Radio is that you can build things like an ATSC digital television receiver, all in software. The problem is that, thanks to the heavy weight of the MPAA and other media lobbies, the FCC gave us the broadcast flag, meaning that a programmer can set a bit that says “do not record” such-and-such.
But to make the broadcast flag effective, you also have to mandate that equipment pay attention to it, and be robust against user modification. You’ve got to make it otherwise illegal to make an ATSC receiver that doesn’t obey it. And sure enough, that’s what the FCC has done; July 2005, any equipment that doesn’t obey the flag is illegal to sell, trade, create, etc.
And with GNU Radio, you write an ATSC receiver that does or doesn’t pay attention to it … at your own peril. It makes specific uses of GNU Radio illegal, and even if you wrote your GNU Radio software to pay attention to the flag, a simple programming error would make your product illegal. Heck, it might even be said that GNU Radio itself will be illegal this year, since it fails the robustness rules.
Receive police and emergency radio frequencies?
Now, whether or not receiving particular frequencies is allowed or not will obviously depend on the FCC and similar regulatory organizations (in most, if not all countries, for instance, receiving police radio frequencies is illegal). Maybe the FCC regulation you mentioned is taking things a bit too far… cell phone standards like GSM are encrypted anyway (unless, of course, you go for a man in the middle attack).
With an amateur radio license it is still legal to receive police and emergency radio frequencies and under certain circumstances it is legal to transmit on them.
What can I legally scan?
A common question that we get is “what can I legally scan?” You’ll be happy to know that it is legal to listen to almost every transmission your scanner can receive. You can hear police and fire departments, ambulance services, government agencies, private companies, amateur radio services, aircraft, and military operations.
However, there are some electronic and wire communications that are illegal to intentionally intercept. These include: telephone conversations (cellular, cordless, or other private means of telephone signal transmission), pager transmissions, and scrambled or encrypted transmissions. According to the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), as amended, you could be fined and possibly imprisoned for intentionally listening to, using, or disclosing the contents of such a transmission unless you have the consent of a party to the communication (unless such activity is otherwise illegal).
