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FCC Orders a Brooklyn Man To Turn Off His Bitcoin Miner Because It Was Interfering With T-Mobile's Wireless Network (arstechnica.com)
A New York City resident was ordered to turn off his bitcoin miner after the Federal Communications Commission discovered that it was interfering with T-Mobile's wireless network. From a report: After receiving a complaint from T-Mobile about interference to its 700MHz LTE network in Brooklyn, New York, FCC agents in November 2017 determined that radio emissions in the 700MHz band were coming from the residence of a man named Victor Rosario. "When the interfering device was turned off the interference ceased," the FCC's enforcement bureau told Rosario in a "Notification of Harmful Interference" yesterday. "You identified the device as an Antminer S5 Bitcoin Miner. The device was generating spurious emissions on frequencies assigned to T-Mobile's broadband network and causing harmful interference." The FCC told Rosario that continued interference with T-Mobile's network while operating the device would be a violation of federal laws "and could subject the operator to severe penalties, including, but not limited to, substantial monetary fines, in rem arrest action to seize the offending radio equipment, and criminal sanctions including imprisonment."
If the miner had its own tinfoil hat, there wouldn't have been any interference!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Disrupting emergency services, helping global warming, distributing child porn... Is there anything Bitcoin CAN'T do?
Harshly worded letter? They'll fine him $10,000 and then seize the equipment and destroy it. Don't mess with the FCC where interference is concerned, he's lucky they gave him a warning instead of just outright fining him because they could have just hit him with the $10k fine and seized the equipment on the first contact.
Faraday cages aren't magic interference stoppers. The emission here was most likely via the power supply cables (or, less likely, data), and those would have to pass through the cage.
Here's how you fix it:
1. Read an article on noise surpression, choke design, capacitive coupling in inductors, choke self-resonance and core material selection.
2. Go ask your nearest ham to build you a noise filter.
All the devices you list are part 15, they are required to accept all interference and that guy on the CB is protected unless you can show he's interfering with protected services. That 700mhz band in the story, it's a protected band and subject to the interference rules.
You misunderstand the actual power of the FCC. Their threats are NOT empty. They have the power to levy fines, have right of entry powers, etc. They don't give a fly fuck about two CB channels cross talking... but fuck with spectrum that's being used by a commercial or governmental entity and they'll drop a fucking hammer on your head.
I was once involved with a college radio station and due to an equipment malfunction (our attenuator failed) we were accidentally transmitting at a much higher power than we should have... the FCC showed up at a campus, exercised their right of entry, disconnected our receiver and then changed the locks. Needless to say, it was a fluckercluck.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
It depends. If the transmitter is actually radiating on the TV channels frequency, then yes, the transmitter can be fined. However, if the problem is that his TV, telephone, and everything else are picking up legally transmitted signals then it is HIS problem.
I used to be able to hear my neighbors shitty CB radio plus linear through my landline, TV, radio and microwave oven.
The FCC has very limited resources to investigate interference complaints, so RESIDENTIAL users generally go by the wayside.
Until they start interfering with a commercial radio service or public safety, at which point the FCC prioritizes a reponse --- i've heard the people who work for that agency say they try to have all complaints from businesses addressed within 10 days or less, and for public safety the time frame is 24 hours.
So if someone's pumping out CB with an Illegal 1Kilowatt amplifier; pinning the coax doesn't sound too unreasonable -- CB users are not legally to be using ANY kind of amplifiers anyways - the FCC generally just isn't there to quickly solve your personal RF woes caused by a neighbor anymore, unless they're making trouble for many people...
Unless you have a HAM licence to protect you can, more or less, ignore them.
Um... your license, If you have one, isn't even at risk, unless you have a bad history or refuse to cooperate with them and
allow station inspections or were being ridiculously negligent or doing deliberately doing something very bad like out-of-band
emissions, emitting an excessive wattage at ground levels, or failing to suppress harmonics...
Most cases of "interference" are just people using cheap electronics, TVs, Phones, etc which are inadequately shielded ---
in this case, the legal responsibility is for the people suffering interference to buy equipment of good design, instead.