Everyone in the Amateur Radio community knows that the FCC is fed up with people using frequencies that they don’t have legal access to and as a result they’ve been issuing increasingly harsh penalties over the past few years.

As for whether he was “doing it in good faith”, well, I question that. The guy was trying to get firefighters to protect his radio repeater site and one of the repeaters located there was for his own business. He had a personal financial interest in getting a fire team over there.

I’m an Amateur Radio operator myself and I have limited sympathy for the situation this guy put himself in. The proper course of action was to leave the wildfire area and come back when it was over, not keep making illegal radio transmissions trying to get firefighters to come over and save his property.