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.
