> You have to be cautious with harmonics reports on these radios because a lot of people seem to try to evaluate them with an SDR... and they are pretty much guaranteed to overload the SDR's front end and cause all kinds of intermodulation that people mistake for emissions of the radio.
This is something more people should know. On the most popular USB SDRs even a local FM radio station will have the appearance of transmitting on harmonics, which I know for certain the serious hams would report within hours.
> ...which I know for certain the serious hams would report within hours.
In reality this is a myth. There are very few people who go to this length. And even the serious Hams will need some serious gear (e.g. KrakenSDR) to pinpoint quickly. Lots of Hams take themselves way too seriously. Folks like NotARubicon on YouTube do a good job of calling it like it is.
I’m not sure about where you are, but here the scene is littered with retired electrical engineers, former broadcast professionals, and military comms specialists with tens of thousands of dollars worth of high-end transceivers, vnas, and small antenna farms. And my point was that the guys with serious gear would quickly notice if a local fm country station was actually transmitting in the amateur bands like a cheap SDR might incorrectly show.
Feel free to send over any fines given out by the FCC within a thousand miles of where you are. There likely aren't any any in the last decade or ever, and this is all public record. Hams are great at scaremongering. They're friendly for the most part, but there are always "some people", especially on air.
You may be arguing a different point now? Whether or not fines have been handed out would not be a reliable indicator of whether "the serious hams would report [an issue with an FM radio station] within hours".
I would expect that issues with FM stations' broadcasts would be very rare, and generally not receive a fine even if it was technically a fine-able offense. This seems like a situation where a ham would call it into the FM station and maybe into the FCC, the station would fix it, the FCC would call the station and just confirm that the station fixed it.
Not arguing a different point. If the offense was such that it would be reported then it should be acted upon in some manner. The reality is that a lot of these spurious emissions are not of any significant reason to react which was my implication with the scaremongering reference. The reality is the FCC approves these cheap Chinese devices and even when they aren't "clean" they rarely impede. Yet what you're referring to is these folks, ultimately, chasing down things that really are not consequential to the airspace however it's an all-hams-on-deck scenario to track down said offenders.
Am I glad these folks are out there? For sure, but there's a fine line of being over the top that they often surpass for little reason.
Just because there are not forfeiture orders does not mean the FCC field agents sit on their ass.
There are a number of technical violations across many licensed services that the FCC finds and organizes resolution. They don’t fine for honest mistakes and failures, only repeated willful violations. You have to be a real jerk to end up with a fine.
In a most boring sense, they are usually component failures or mistakes in maintenance or operation.
I have been involved in several notices from FCC field offices on technical issues in the first half of my working life, some of them pretty awful ideas and yet none of them resulted in fines when cleaned up in a reasonable amount of time.
Even when an errant AT&T microwave transmitter took out the lower half of the 3 GHz band in Detroit for three weeks, the FCC stepped in, confirmed the source, found who was responsible and the interference solved. No fines, no PR, just a days work.
The FCC doesnt do a lot of enforcement, but there is certainly more than zero. I see about a dozen enforcement actions this year here: https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/orders?page=1
These are mostly violations for transmitting in the FM broadcast band (88-108MHz) without a license.
This is something more people should know. On the most popular USB SDRs even a local FM radio station will have the appearance of transmitting on harmonics, which I know for certain the serious hams would report within hours.