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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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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"?

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.

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.

An aircraft radio control transmitter is pretty obviously that. Unless you're going to claim it's really for controlling muppets.

Yes, and I expect eliminating the RC aircraft hobby is intentional

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.

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)

I simply cannot see how the government could legally stop me from building and flying a hobby quadrotor.

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.