It looks to me like the FCC doesn’t bother going after ignorant violators or those who don’t threaten public services like police and fire departments or in legacy communications technologies like non-trunked VHF and UHF. In most editions of QST magazine, you’ll find news of some violator who taunted police on their radio system or who accessed a commercial or government satellite illegally, or who transmitted in the CB (11 meter) band using an HF radio at high power in a way that angers a lot of local people. Typically it’s the intentional taunting or the threatening of a sensitive resource that draws attention from the FCC. When they come after you with fines that exceed the value of your home, the results can be life changing. Typically the violator begs for forgiveness after they’re caught, and if they’re lucky they just lose their license and pay a reduced amount of $50k or so in a plea bargain. For the most part, no one cares if you use your baofeng handheld radio to talk on GMRS or Marine frequencies although there is no guarantee of not getting caught. As I get older, I keep the rules for the same reason I drive the speed limit and don’t run red lights. I joked in another forum that if you want one hand held radio that is legal to use on all frequencies, you need to carry a whole bucket full of hand held radios with you. From a technical perspective, all you need is one modified ham radio to cover almost everything. But to comply with FCC type-acceptance rules, you need a whole bucket full of radios (one radio for Marine, one radio for GMRS, one radio for commercial use, etc…). It’s much easier and the alternatives aren’t worth doing. Going back to the Librem 5, I don’t know if there are type-acceptance rules yet for cell phones or for accessing wifi or mesh networks. For the most part, the only way to access those bands has been by using commercial products that were intended to access those bands. But L5 modem swapping will for sure not allow for accessing any of the VHF or UHF bands because of radio type-acceptance requirements with only one exception. Amateur radio bands are the exception because radio (hardware) type-acceptance rules do not apply to the Amateur radio bands. Basically, radio type acceptance says that a radio is not legally allowed to transmit in to a given type of radio service band until after the FCC has type-accepted (approved) the radio that will do the transmitting for use in that specific radio service. One FCC rule says that (paraphrasing here) any one model of radio can only legally access one radio service type. They intentionally prohibit multi-use or multi-service types of radio from legal use. For example, they don’t want any radios out there that can access both marine bands and commercial/public service bands, or that can access GMRS and also any other radio service band from the same radio. Amateur radio is the exception. Any radio can be used to access the amateur radio bands, even if that radio is type-accepted for use in another radio service type. But most mainstream amateur radio experimentation and use does not yet go above 1.2 GHz (1200 MHz). Most of us don’t have any hardware that will go above 1.2 GHz. We can see a lot of spectrum space available above 1.2 GHz that is legal for us to use in very large spectrum slices spread-out throughout most of the different bands going all of the way up to visible light, if we could only get to some of them.
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