Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] amateur "exemption"

[Dave Emery]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 09:53:17AM -0800, Eric Blossom wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 09:35:21PM -0500, ed wrote:
> > interestingly, government users are Winradio's biggest customers.  they use 
> > proprietary software, of course.
> > 
> > here's another interesting piece of hardware and software that qualifies 
> > the possessor as a violator.  doubtful this swiss company could do much 
> > business in the usa with non-govt customers.  notice their source code is 
> > for sale..."to official government bodies only."
> > http://www.shoc.ch/HTML/wavecom.htm
> > 
> > -ed
> 
> Thanks for the link.  I wasn't familiar with them.

        There is Wavecom and their products and another European
company called Hoka that makes DSP based decoders primarily oriented
to HF RTTY decoding.   Both are well known in the shortwave listening
community.   And until fairly recently there was a third US
based outfit - Universal Radio - which made RTTY signal decoders.

        Wavecom has been making noises about offering wider bandwidth
decoding of things like satellite digital voice and fax, for which
there is significant interest in Europe.

        And AOR has talked about offering a DSP box with a 10.7 mhz
for use with their scanners to decode things like APCO-25 trunking.

        All of these products were once sold by dealers in the US
to US based addresses and many many hobbists have them.

        But after the BNN decision that criminalized POCSAG and GOLAY
decoders US based hobby radio equipment dealers have been pressured
to stop selling these decoders in the US except to approved government
agencies and telecom organizations (same as cell capable scanners)
because all of them are capable of decoding at least POCSAG paging.
And apparently the manufacturers have decided not to offer a US
edition without the paging capability.



-- 
        Dave Emery N1PRE,  address@hidden  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. 
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2  5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18