France Says D-Star Ham Radio Mode Is Illegal

gyrogeerloose writes "Citing 'national security concerns,' the French Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes (ARCEP, France's equivalent of the US's FCC) has ruled that D-Star, an amateur radio digital signal mode used world-wide, is illegal because it could allow operators to connect to the Internet.The ARCEP also cites alleged concerns regarding cryptography and national security as well as the use of a proprietary codec. While it's true that the D-Star codec is proprietary, its owner has openly licensed it (for a fee, of course) to any manufacturer who wants to build it into their equipment. Any licensed amateur radio operator who lives within the EU can sign an online petition protesting this decision."

Comments

Re:Wait, What?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a ham in the U.S., I can tell you that here, there is a severe restriction on communication in that no commercial messages may be relayed. It took years for the FCC to grant an exemption to allow hams to autopatch to order pizza.

As far as I know, there's no exemption for ads (adsense or otherwise), which would severely restrict what traffic you could have over the session. IRC MOTDs that advertise the hosting service? AdSense web ads? Nope, nope.

Re:Why now?

[Eric Green]

I am on a D-STAR discussion list. Apparently the issue is that D-STAR has not previously been an allowed digital mode in France, and there is an old time neanderthal HF ham radio guy in their radio regulatory department (the type of guy who believes ham radio died the moment there was no longer a requirement to build your own HF morse code transceiver in order to get a ham license) who does not believe that *any* digital modes should be allowed who is now in a position to block the adoption of new digital modes. Check out this list of a large number of digital modes that are banned in France (note that this page is in French, but if you are American you should be able to read the huge number of disallowed modes, and the much smaller number of allowed modes at the end). In any event, the whole "can be routed over the Internet" thingy is a base canard being used by this old-school guy to disallow digital modes, rather than the real reason, so ... (shrug).