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Which is why wideband SDR's like hackRF are licenced as laboratory equipment. So the regulatory regime is the one for spectrum analyzers and signal generators.

Which is why wideband SDR's like hackRF are licenced as laboratory equipment. So the regulatory regime is the one for spectrum analyzers and signal generators. I have always wondered if people in the old days used the FM demodulation option to listen in on phone calls.

CamperBob2 4y ago
That was what was so stupid about the mandatory cellular-blocking legislation. You didn't need test equipment or even a scanner to spy on AMPS phones... you just needed an old TV with a UHF tuner. The upper end of the UHF TV band overlapped the 800 MHz AMPS band nicely, and NTSC TV audio was FM, just like cellular (albeit WBFM rather than NBFM.) It's probably lucky that no one ever brought a case to court (or testified in Congress) regarding 'civilian' use of a spectrum analyzer for cellular eavesdropping. Otherwise we'd be unable to buy anything even remotely resembling today's SDRs. They'd be driven out of the market like pirate radio transmitters were. The law should be brought up to date, but who wants to open that can of Pandora's worms?