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The Trump Administration has "solved" the drone problem another way. They've abused an FCC regulation and banned all new model drones and drone components that aren't made in the US. Since there are currently no domestic civilian drones, nor as far as I know transmitters or receivers or motors, this "solves" the problem. US-manufactured drones with a fully US supply chain will be cost-prohibitive for anyone who isn't using them to replace a helicopter. And domestic companies can be leaned on by the DoD and DHS to track their customers and keep quantities limited.
In the future, the little child won't have a drone. As for the jolly roger sticker, I thought about buying some to put on my model helicopters where the FAA ID should go, but I didn't bother.
I haven't looked into this but, uh, define "drone components". I used to be a hobbyist quadrotor pilot and assembled my own quadrotors from off the shelf parts and kits. I simply do not see how the government could possibly prevent me from doing that with the authority it has.
The FCC has authority over anything that emits radio waves, but in order to use the FCC to ban drones you would need to ban, essentially, all RC vehicle controllers (totally eliminating the entire RC car, aircraft, and quadrotor hobbies) and wireless video transmitters (eliminating every single thing where people want to watch a camera on a screen without wires).
These things all operate in ISM bands which have very few regulations with the teeth you would need to ban these things.
In order to ban drones you would also need to ban brushless motors, consumer availability of carbon fiber sheets and tubes, microcontrollers, mosfets, etc.
I just don't see what the government could possibly do to actually crack down on the ability to build and fly a drone without an absolutely ludicrous level of restrictions on the entire market for electronics components.
Whether it includes all these if they aren't claimed to be part of a UAS is yet to be seen. But it would be hard to claim flight controllers or ground control stations aren't. A car controller isn't very useful for an aircraft.
Yes, and I expect eliminating the RC aircraft hobby is intentional; like I said, they want to reduce the amount of possibly-innocent flying objects.
What defines a circuit board with a microcontroller on it as a "flight controller"? The software running on the microcontroller, and the fact that you have the thing hooked up to a radio control receiver and some motor drivers, are what actually makes it a flight controller. If the thing enters the country without software on it, and not hooked up to a radio control receiver or any motor drivers, what makes it a "flight controller"?
Same thing with "ground control station." If I'm flying a hobby racing quadcopter I have a radio control transmitter and a video receiver. If I'm doing something fancier I might have... an ordinary laptop computer hooked up to the radio control transmitter and a telemetry receiver.
They're literally the same thing - Some potentiometers hooked up to a radio transmitter.
I doubt the authority of the FCC to do this for devices operating in the ISM band. If you have an amateur radio license, remote control of vehicles is something that the CFR specifically lists as something your license permits you to do.
I simply cannot see how the government could legally stop me from building and flying a hobby quadrotor.
You have to call it something when you request your FCC authorization. You also have to have software running to do the necessary tests. Yes, you can lie, but if you're trying to do legitimate business that's not going to work.
An aircraft radio control transmitter is pretty obviously that. Unless you're going to claim it's really for controlling muppets.
The FCC can refuse authorization of anything on the Covered List, and import or use of devices which require FCC authorization and don't have it is forbidden. And of course most of us don't have an amateur radio license; I never had the desire to get an attaboy from an amateur bureaucracy because I could tell a dit from a dah at high speed. (I know, there's no-code licenses now)
The FCC can stop you from legally buying the necessary parts; the FAA can prevent you from flying it (legally). They've been adding hoops to be legal to fly for a while now, and the way I read it most people aren't (one of the requirements to meet the recreational exception is that you need to follow the code of some "community based organization", and one of the rules of two of the CBOs is that you have to have a flight line dividing spectators from aircraft, and that implies you have a field you can control). The thing is, it's neither the FCC nor the FAA which wants to do this. The FAA wants to make it very cumbersome, but that's just what the FAA does. But DHS and the DoD want civilian drones to go away or at least be strictly controlled (i.e. in the hands of big, responsible, corporations that they can lean on), so they lean on the FAA and FCC to do things.
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The whole point of counter-drone warfare is that the drone operator is up to no good. I don't think they give a darn about fcc regulation and motors and flight controllers are still available to import for non-drone related uses.
Hence the scare quotes around "solved". Though I think they actually have thought of that; they are trying to reduce the attack surface and make the bad actors more visible by eliminating the majority of the innocent actors with the same technology. That way they know anyone with a drone (who isn't on their good-boy list) is bad.
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