International communication guidelines are intended to be permissive. Unless a country has notified the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency, that it objects to FCC-licensed amateur stations exchanging communications with its citizens you may do so.

As of June 7, 2022, according to the FCC, there were "no banned countries". In other words, it is currently permissible for an FCC-licensed amateur to communicate with all countries.

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Historically, Amateur Radio frequencies are shared with or adjacent to military radio frequencies. In order to test the capability of Amateur Radio operators to coordinate radio communications with the military communicating on those frequencies is allowed on an Armed Forces Day Communications test.

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Control commands may need ciphers or codes to prevent unauthorized users from controlling a radio control craft or space station; otherwise, you are never allowed to hide the meaning of a message.

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The Amateur Radio service may retransmit the audio from manned spacecraft (such as the international space station). They often use music in that audio; because this music is incidental and in order to allow retransmission of the full program from the spacecraft an exception has been made to the "no music" rule for this purpose.

There is no other time when an amateur station is authorized to transmit music; this doesn't mean that you'll be prosecuted for transmitting when there is music in the background (particularly if you're helping with a parade or other community event where it is unavoidable) but you should avoid it when practical and it is never permissible to intentionally transmit snippets of music (of any length).

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Tags: rules and regulations best practices operating rules

While it is illegal to use Amateur Radio for profit, a limited exception is made to allow operators to offer equipment for sale with a few restrictions:

• Only on an occasional basis. If you have a stack of equipment you may offer it for sale, but you can't make a living selling salvaged ham radio equipment.

• Only to sell equipment that is part of a normal amateur station; it shouldn't be used to sell iPads, computers, other non-radio-related equipment, etc.

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Indecent or obscene words and language are always prohibited on the Amateur Radio service; this represents one of the biggest differences in the "personality" of the Ham Radio service compared to other non-licensed services such as Citizen's Band (CB) and Family Radio Service (FRS).

What specifically "obscene or indecent words or language" means is left somewhat up to the interpretation of the operator; There may be a list somewhere of what the FCC considers obscene or indecent but it is generally accepted to mean any form of profanity or language that may be inappropriate for children. Good rule of thumb here is to only use language that you would be comfortable with in "polite company".

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Auxiliary stations are defined as An amateur station, other than a message forwarding system, that is transmitting communications point-to-point within a system of cooperating amateur stations [97.3(a)(7)].

Repeater stations are defined as an amateur station that simultaneously retransmits the transmission of another amateur station on a different channel or channels [97.3(a)(39)]

Stations may automatically retransmit signals from either of these types of stations as well as signals from the space station, which is a concession designed to make it possible for stations to listen to space station transmissions and broadcasts that may otherwise be limited to only those with special equipment.

Beacon signals are only broadcasts and do not need to be retransmitted and "earth station" would be redundant with "repeater" since a repeater is an earth station, so the three distractors can be easily eliminated.

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Amateur radio operators are prohibited from receiving compensation for their services. This exception allows a teacher to use a ham radio as part of their classroom instruction without being in violation of this prohibition in a legal sense.

In this case, the instructor is not being compensated directly for use of the radio but is being compensated for their duties as an instructor. Therefore, acting as a control operator for the amateur radio station cannot be a major part of their job, but must be incidental to other instruction.

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The basic rule of thumb is that anything is allowed in an emergency if there is not a better way to solve the problem. Generally, amateur radio bands should be reserved for actual emergency communications during an emergency but if there is no other way to get news and such out during an emergency then Amateur Radio may be used for this purpose.

Other than in an emergency, there is never a time when broadcasts should be made over Amateur Radio; the only potentially confusing distractor on this question is the one relating to the space shuttle because it is allowed to retransmit transmissions from a space station; however, this asks about signals related to broadcasting, program production, or news gathering which is not the same as retransmitting a simple transmission from a space station intended for that purpose.

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Broadcasting is a term that is sometimes a bit touchy in the amateur radio community; FM radio stations broadcast radio programs and music to the general public; this is broadcasting, because there is never an expected response or a specific audience. Sometimes in Amateur Radio parts of a program are transmitted over amateur frequencies, but never as a regular "show", and never intended for the general public -- intended instead for ham radio operators. In addition, the rule of identifying every 10 minutes applies.

The primary difference between a broadcast and any other transmission is that a transmission has a specific audience -- even if it's "all amateur radio operators in the area". As an additional note, such transmissions (intended for all listening amateur radio operators) are usually prefixed with "QST" often repeated 3 times to indicate a general announcement for all operators.

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Amateur Radio is intended for communicating between stations, hobbyists, learning, establishing international goodwill, etc; it is not intended to enable broadcasting to the general public. For that reason, retransmission of entertainment programming or material from any regular TV or Radio station is not allowed -- if it were, we soon would no longer have any room left in the amateur bands because people would be using it to retransmit TV and Radio programs all the time!

For the same reason, communications that are more appropriate to ("could reasonably be furnished alternatively through") another radio service is not permitted.

However, you are allowed to make brief transmissions to help adjust your station -- for example, it's pretty difficult to adjust an antenna tuner to get good SWR without making any test transmissions to measure your SWR!

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