Operating "on an amateur band" is not the same as "operating under the rules of the amateur radio service." The 2.4GHz WiFi allocation in the US is "an amateur band", but when you buy your home router you are not "operating under the rules of the amateur radio service". Similarly, there are overlapping amateur/non-amateur allocations at 900 MHz. And there are a lot of 434 MHz things (lower end of the amateur 70cm band) that aren't operating under the rules of the amateur radio service.

I didn't need a ham license when I bought and installed my wireless weather system (one of those "434MHz things"), and I don't need a ham license to use one of the Ubiquity M900 links this system is based on.

Yes.

It is using a commercially available product for the purpose it was designed. If it was that illegal to do, the FCC would have confiscated all of Ubiquity's product and levied a fine for violation of the FCC regulations.

You can buy them from more than 200 distributors worldwide. The genie is out of the bottle, the horse has left the barn. It's not the full system, but anyone with any technical proficiency in networking can put it together in their sleep almost.

I have a system with a pair of COTS 5GHz bridge wireless boxes that does exactly the same thing this system is supposed to do. I fear no dark suits telling me to stop.

If anyone can use the frequency, it is really hard to impose a regulation that applies ONLY to the amateur radio service upon those users. You might have to explain how Ubiquity is managing to sell the 900 MHz device that the article points to if the only data it can "retransmit" is from amateur radio stations.

This system isn't designed with amateur radio equipment, so Part 97 of the rules are irrelevant.

You're right, you haven't looked into it.

If you click on the link in TFA, you'll wind up looking at a Ubiquity M900 bridge product, which while it uses the 900 MHz band, is NOT an amateur radio device. Amateur radio has nothing to do with the discussion, therefore. And the amateur radio prohibition on encryption to hide content is irrelevant.*

Nine hundred megahertz is also not "low-frequency". It is in the ULTRA HIGH frequency (UHF) portion of the spectrum. It is lower than the normal 2.4GHz of WiFi, but low it is not.

It seems pretty clear that this entire fiasco is intended to draw attention to the author or his company. There is nothing illegal about using a license-free wireless bridging device to extend a network connection. There is nothing illegal about connecting to a public WiFi access point using a device within the normal coverage area of that AP, and that's where the connection is being made, no matter how far away the user happens to be. Imagine someone putting a laptop with a wired connection in range of the public WiFi point and accessing that laptop from Lithuania, e.g., to use the WiFi. Would anyone think that was illegal? Or try this one: I have a computer at home with a wireless connection to the public WiFi in the library next door. I put a modem on the system and dial in from a remote location. Am I breaking the law if I do anything remotely over the wireless connection? Of course not.

There's nothing to see here, it's a waste of time. "ProxyHam" is using COTS gear to do what it was designed to do.

* the "prohibition on encryption" is not as absolute as some try to claim. The prohibition is on hiding content because the amateur rules have restrictions on what content is legal, and the amateur radio service is mostly self-policing. Other hams have to be able to see your content to know if you're breaking the rules and should be reported. As everett mentions, there is something that used to be called "HSMM" (high speed multimedia), now referred to as "meshnet" or something like that. Users of that system, because it coincides with the license-free 2.4GHz WiFi band, regularly use WEP or WPA as an access control method. Because it is for "access control" and not "hiding the content", the FCC has not acted to shut such systems down.

The escape clause, so to speak, for that system is that it uses one of a few standard "passwords" that are published on various websites so, in theory, the wireless traffic can be monitored by others but the general public will be kept out.

"She kept saying it's a crime." It's in the damn summary. "Kept saying" == "more than once". "it's a crime", when spoken by a member of the police, is an instruction to stop. It doesn't matter if she "just" asked him to unplug, the request was made along with the information that he was committing a crime. He decided to push the issue and he got what he wanted.

And "de-arresting" him doesn't mean what he did wasn't a crime, it only means they dropped the charge. Why should they keep the minor charge when he helped them by resisting?

I don't care what other specious analogies you've come up with, right here we're talking about the person who asked him to stop multiple times and he refused. She wasn't the business owner, she was a part of the police. The business owner didn't call her to come deal with this, she was on her regular rounds. The business owner has nothing to do with this.

What "the real cops" call her is irrelevant, she's still a part of the system.

You have the ability to stop resorting to personal insults. You should try it.

She is a POLICE community support officer. That makes her a member of the police system.

No, she didn't, but she chose to when her request to stop doing something illegal was refused. Cops tend to do that. If you continue to break the law after one of them asks you to stop, then you get what you want: an escalation of the confrontation. If a cop thinks what you're doing is important enough to actually ask you to stop, then you should be smart enough to know they think it is important enough for you to actually stop.

She's not the one who arrested him, they were. They didn't have to arrest him, either, but they did, and then later changed their mind. But he's still charged with disorderly or whatever they call resisting over there.

This has nothing to do with how a business owner treats customers, so your attempt at sidetracking the issue will be ignored.

You must be kidding. You think it is a violation of the electrical code if I tell you not to plug your crap into my outlet?

He was asked to stop and refused to do so.

If the change resulted in a spike that doubled or tripled or more the voltage (keep in mind the inductive nature of electrical wiring and the motors attached to them) it could blow it out.

Even the transients caused by switching the motors (how the speed is controlled) can be huge.

If you can buy a USB charger for $2, you have to realize how cheaply made they are. Cheaply made means all those bits that would make them survive abnormal use and protect the device being charged are left out.

She told him he couldn't use it. She is probably not authorized to yank it out herself due to liability issues. ("You broke my charger when you pulled it out, buy me a new one...")

She IS the cops. She's not one that can arrest people, but she's part of the same system.

If the outlet was marked "not for public use", it was a crime to use it to start with, the cop caught him using it, and he refused to simply unplugged when instructed to do so, I MIGHT step in to try to defuse the situation if I cared about the guy.

If he was just one of an endless number of customers and I wanted to make it clear that the outlet he was using was not for public use so I didn't have lots of people abusing it, I might not bother interfering with them.

Given that this guy is a captive customer (whose train are you going to take except mine?), a tiny part of my revenue, and creating a problem, why should I interfere with police doing their job?

Maintenance. Liability. Increased customer expectations ("you have some outlets for us to use, you should add more..."). Three issues his use of that outlet create for me.

Imagine a 50 mile section of track all powered by one substation. Imagine the IR drop of running the power for all the trains on that track for an average of 25 miles. Imagine the changes in IR drop as the I changes as trains use more or less current to accelerate or come to a stop.

If you don't want to imagine one long stretch of track all powered from one substation, then imagine that there are multiple substations and the train must switch from one to the next, and that the IR drop at the end of the one being left will be high (i.e. low voltage) and the voltage of the next will be higher until the train starts drawing current from it.

Electric trains use power from those wires overhead and the tracks below (or sometimes a third rail). If you need a citation to understand why there might be huge fluctuations in voltage during travel, I'd suggest Halliday and Resnick for a review of the physics of electronics.

Which is what happened here. The community service officer kept telling the guy that he wasn't allowed to use the outlet, which means she told him the first time and he kept doing it. And doing it, until the train reached the station. She then turned it over to the police on the platform.

He should have said "ok, sorry", unplugged, and the matter would have ended. He wanted to make a point. So, the police made a point, too.

It's just plain stupid to argue with a law enforcement official (even if she can't arrest you herself) about something that is plainly marked as not for public use, and which is technically illegal. When you force her to call for backup, you've just escalated the matter much further than it deserves to go and you are going to lose. Even if all the cops did was pull you from the train for a discussion, you've lost more time that it is worth.

I have cellphone and tablet chargers that provide 2 amps at 5 volts. That's 10W. And cellphones and tablets that use that full current to charge faster. Assuming 90% efficiency in the charger, that's 11W at the AC side.

My Dell laptop charger is rated at 3.34A at 19.5V, which is 65W.

Your 200mW charger would provide less than 40 mA to charge your phone. You'll need to ride the train for a VERY long time for your phone to get any reasonable charge at that rate, and your laptop will actually be discharging while it is plugged in.

The USB system has 500mA as the design spec. That's 2.5W minimum. No, nobody is talking about a charger that would use just 200 mW.

The issue is not how much electricity it uses. There are two major issues.

1. Liability. Rail company allows people to plug in. Surges and brownouts in power as the train crosses power boundaries cause damage to an $800 cellphone. Who pays for that? And the lawyers when the passenger sues.

2. Wear and tear. Hundreds of people plugging and unplugging every day will create wear and tear, and increases maintenance costs. A broken or worn outlet can cause shorts, which can cause fires.

The guy should have said "sorry" and unplugged instead of trying to make a point. The outlet was marked, he was in the wrong. The police should have pulled him from the train, discussed the matter with him long enough to make him late for wherever he was going to make THEIR point, and then sent him on his way.

But turning it into disorderly, that's all on him.

I know what you said. But buses don't avoid traffic, they operate on the same streets I use to drive my car. They, in fact, hinder traffic, since they stop in the street to pick up passengers and force all the traffic behind them in that lane to either stop or try to change lanes to go around.

I have yet to compete in travel time with a bus while driving and have the bus win. I can drive the shortest route from A to B and don't have to stop every two blocks to pick up or drop off; the bus has a fixed route that takes it a roundabout way. It has a semi-fixed route, so the only way to speed up service is to buy more buses. That costs money. And costing money is the enemy of making things cheaper.

It can be. It can also be longer than driving. A lot longer. I can take the train to the nearest "big city", but it sure won't be faster than just driving it myself. First, I have to drive over to the train station, and that's 20 minutes. I wait for the train that shows up four hours late. I'm now 4:20 into a trip that I can make in 1:30 by car. Let's say it takes just an hour to get to the city in that train. That's now 5:20. But I don't wind up where I want to go, I'm at the train station. I have to find other transport to get where I want to go. Add :30 as an estimate. Six hours for a 90 minute door-to-door trip. Ok, we'll give the train system the benefit of the doubt and the train leaves one minute after I get to the station. Still two hours. And I have to drive to the station anyway.

The FACT is that if you live near a train station and work near a train station, taking the train will probably be faster than driving. IF everything works right.

About the only way to speed up train transit is to run more trains so you don't wait as long at the station for the next one -- you can't just have them go twice as fast. It costs a lot of money to run another train, if you can even fit one in the schedule. Speed it up and make it cheaper? Sorry, two opposing concepts.

No, my argument is with your statement that you can speed up public transit and have it still be cheaper. The only way to speed up a bus system is to add more buses to cut down the waiting time, or spend a LOT of money creating dedicated bus roads. Even then, if the bus takes a roundabout route and I'm going straight, the bus loses. You can't "speed up" service and still have it be cheap.

You're right, I've never lived in a city that needs to have trains to get from one side to the other. A lot of the US is like that. Unfortunately, to make the train system faster and easier would cost a lot of money, therefore eliminating the "cheaper" bit. For trains you'd need more trains, more stations, and more tracks to make it "easier" and "faster". For buses, you need more buses, more bus lanes, and more routes. There goes "cheaper".

Government run, taxpayer funded jobs tend not to be a long-term benefit to the economy. They tend to be exactly the opposite.

It will also take a sea-change in the demographic structure in the US, moving people to where it would be feasible to support public transport in place of automobiles, OR building so much public transport infrastructure that you turn the entire country into urban blight. Too many people live too far away from each other to reach the population density necessary to support trains or buses everywhere all the time. That's the fact that city dwellers who live in high-density areas where costs of vehicle operation are already inflated and density of population actually supports regular and ubiquitous public transport keep forgetting. Out here in the rest of the country, parking doesn't cost an arm and a leg and running a bus every five minutes would only mean you have a lot of empty buses.

It's a long walk, and I'd rather not show up to work sweaty from a bike ride, thanks. The issue is not whether walking or biking is better than a bus, though.

In other words, your employer has convinced you that you should do his work on your own time.

Every so often I think that maybe I ought to buy a good laptop computer because it could do so much more than the netbook I've got. Then I think about what I'd be doing so much more of. Most of it would be work related. Why should I spend my money so I can do more work for my employer?

For that 25 minute car ride you can listen to audio books on any subject that interests you. You can think about non-work stuff. You can listen to news or sports and learn about the world. You can get podcasts on thousands of topics.

The idea that a mode of transportation gets bonus points because it allows you to perform more work for other people instead of for yourself, well, that's sad.