Comment on Is Baofeng flagrantly lying to the FCC and endangering users? A deep dive
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours agoI’m about to become very unpopular around here I’m sure, but I use a baofeng uv5x3 daily and have not been burned by it yet. Am I gonna turn into a feral ghoul?
Haven’t noticed any spurious transmissions, then again the closest thing I have to a spectrum analyzer is a flipper zero and I haven’t tried to use that (idk if it would work for this anyway.)
MotoAsh@piefed.social 5 hours ago
You won’t get burned by it unless it’s breaking and you’re direcring touching the chips. It’s simply not enough power to burn anyone unless something is going very wrong (most of the power should be going in to RF transmission, not heat).
In addition, it literally cannot emit the right kinds of energy to produce ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation starts around 10eV per particle/photon. That’s more energy than visible light photons (green is ~2.4eV, and deep blue is ~3.3eV), which are much more energetic than RF photons. So unless the thing is freaking glowing in colors and sucking down a ton of electricity magically without burning out, it won’t be emitting ionizing radiation.
All that cellphone cancer scare crap from the 90’s/2000’s was and always will be people not understanding the massive difference between “radiation” and “ionizing radiation”.
Even if it turns out it’s emitting spurious transmissions or breaking FCC power limits, all that means is you better not get caught intentionally using it with those settings without licensing (as if the FCC is going around monitoring for slightly abnormal RF anyways).
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
Not gonna lie it sounds like it’d be very cool for about 2s if that happened. Y’know until I died and stuff, but glowing radio! /jk
Nah I figured if I was going to be literally burned it would have happened by now lol, I was mostly kidding on that part and also offering my hands on expertise that I haven’t been burned yet at all.
But yeah if they haven’t realized I’m using a baofeng on totally legal freqs yet something tells me they won’t find spurious transmissions. Still though, while I’m a fan of breaking dumb rules I’m also a fan of following the ones that make sense and I wouldn’t want to actually cause anyone issues, so while I may be running it on a redacted frequency (maaaaaaaybe at .5w higher than the fcc would like) I’d like to do what I can to make sure it doesn’t cause real issues for people (and so far it seems it has not, but maybe I need to analyze the spectrum.)