What RADAR can "civilians" buy ?

[lordvader88]

I'm just wondering how restricted RADAR is for civilians, I guess it varies country to country. I see small fishing vessels with radar, I'm almost assuming they even need a license or something for it. I watched a teardown of a small boat radar, looked fun.

[alpher]

Actually in Canada there's not much of an issue owning radar, a frend of mine had a small sailboat ~40' and bought an
if I remember right a Garmin radar system for it without any problems, certainly didn't need any licence for it.
It's not exactly cheap but not extraordinally expensive either his was arround $2k.

[Ian.M]

30 seconds with Google found: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/smt-gst.nsf/eng/h_sf01775.html

Basically if you operate a Canadian flagged vessel *exclusively* within Canadian territorial waters and your radar and radio transciever equipment is type approved and meets the frequency limits and power level restrictions defined within ' Regulation by Reference RBR-2' (linked from that page), the vessel does not require a radio or radar licence.

Internationally, its usual for one's ship's radio licence issued by one's national authority, to be endorsed with the radar equipment type and operating band.

Sorry, cant help you with local or international land based or aviation radar licencing requirements, its not something I've ever studied.

If you don't give a shit to the law, you can buy virtually anything on eBay, rest of a nuke.
And if you use a radio equipment wisely (not continuously, not in crowded, enforced areas, not intentionally maliciously), chances of being caught is next to non existent.

.... unless, in most developed countries,  you are inadvertently or deliberately operating in a band used by the cops or monitored by your national aviation authority, or used by mobile phone companies, in which case if your signal is detected, they will go above and beyond to identify and locate you, and they can and will throw the book at you, including confiscation of all equipment, any vehicle or vessel its mounted in or connected to, draconian fines and a possible prison sentence if they deem it to have been potentially interfering with emergency communications or safety of navigation. 

If you are going to break the law then you are an idiot if your usage is from a fixed location, or if it stands out from the usual legitimate usage of that band in that area.  e.g. if you are operating 'kitchen coastal' on the marine VHF band,  use a callsign that's plausible for a small sailboat, follow proper radio procedure, and don't operate far from the water's edge!   

[lordvader88]

Ok so people must repair them sometimes too. I was wondering what people did with old broken ones around here.

Sadly there's no old junk yards here with old scrap electronics.

[Ian.M]

Boat breakers, Marinas auctioning off abandoned vessels and gear from them and second hand chandlers are your best option.    Its all perfectly legal if you use it on a moveable raft (that could be paddled) or dinghy on a decent sized duckpond!   However floating a raft in a kiddie's paddling pool in your back yard wouldn't work as  a legal defence - the raft would need to be capable of unimpeded navigation within the pool + of supporting the operator.

[Lord of nothing]

Hmm what kind of Radar do you mean? On a Vessel? A Car? My Rooftop? 

[T3sl4co1l]

If you don't give a shit to the law, you can buy virtually anything on eBay, rest of a nuke.
And if you use a radio equipment wisely (not continuously, not in crowded, enforced areas, not intentionally maliciously), chances of being caught is next to non existent.

Important to remember that nothing is illegal in a physical sense.  Legal laws are not physical laws.  A lot of people may say "you can't do that!" when you're violating a legal law.  No.  You can't violate the law of gravity.  Or when you're playing a video game, you cannot do something that isn't in the game code.  Whereas, legally speaking, you can do whatever you want, any time you want.  Legal laws are merely consequences that you should consider before taking actions that run afoul of them.  When those consequences are worse than the rewards, you avoid those actions; else, you take them.

Which might give you some inference about the meaning of those consequences.  If the rewards are vast, and the consequences modest, who is really benefiting from those actions?  Both the perpetrator and the government are benefiting.  Various ethics, trade and investment violations happen to follow this pattern.  If you wonder why CEOs are repeatedly allowed to get away with such things, now you know: it's not that they're not supposed to, it's that they're encouraged to by the system (so long as the system gets its cut).

Also, law is mostly what people make of it.  If you're doing something that makes people complain, the authorities will probably catch up to you at some point.  If you do something technically illegal but no one cares, you'll probably skate by for a long time.  On the upside, this is encouraging for, say, pirate radio operators.  On the downside, this might give you some idea what kinds of people a serial killer might prefer to target...

Tim

[Ian.M]

All true, and you'll 'fly under the radar' until you upset some one who's got enough 'skin in the game' to press for official action.   Apart from LEO and other official radio users, its a particularly bad idea to even slightly upset radio amateurs.

The hams have worked hard to get the licences they enjoy, and are usually none too happy about interlopers as their bands are already under all sorts of pressure from interference, government uses and commercial entities wanting a chunk of the spectrum.   They also typically either have experience with investigating interference, or know someone who does, due to having to defend themselves from false accusations from idiots who've seen the ham's aerial masts and blamed them for everything including their cousin's kids school grades.   

Typically hams not only have the skills and equipment to do direction finding, friends who will do the same to help them triangulate your position, or even go mobile in the target area to further refine the report, and a significant number have contacts in and a good working relationship with enforcement agencies.  Heck, they even call it foxhunting and do it for fun or as a competitive sport.

TLDR: Stay off the HAMs' lawn!

[radar_macgyver]

Depends on what you mean by radar, and what you mean by 'civilian'.

As mentioned, you can buy marine radars as an individual in most parts of the world. You can also buy or build simple CW or FMCW radars with off-the-shelf parts in various ISM bands. Cars these days have radars in them as well. You can get industrial liquid level sensors that use radar.

Air traffic control, en-route surveillance and national weather service radars are civilian, but not individually owned . It's a dying trend, but many TV stations used to operate their own weather radars. Some universities do too. All of the latter require licensing for their frequency bands. Not to mention (usually) 3-phase power and the sheer space taken up by the antenna structures.

[rhb]

I'd like to elaborate on  Ian.M's comment about messing around in the ham bands. 

There was an instance of malicious interference by another ham here.  The ham targeted was able to ID the specific equipment used by the behavior of the signal at power on and power off.  Every transmitter is slightly different in that respect.  So with recordings of the malicious interference signatures, it was simple to prove who the culprit was.  He already knew who the culprit was and where.  He just needed irrefutable proof. The evidence was supplied to the FCC and they came down on the perpetrator very hard.

I was told about this at the local club meeting.  There have been no local incidents of malicious interference since.

These days it's common for serious hams to have an SDR monitoring all the ham bands and displaying the activity on a monitor as a waterfall display.  By popular demand, SDRplay has just introduced the RSPduo, a dual tuner SDR able to monitor two bands at once.

The only thing that will get you in trouble faster than illegal activity on the ham bands is interfering with radionavigation and aircraft communications.

A <$200 US  SDR is capable of recording a 10 MHz swath of spectrum to disk for playback at any time in the future.  So a few of these and even though you only operate for a few seconds, your location can still be determined at any time afterwards.

It is reasonable to assume that everything from DC to daylight is recorded at multiple locations by the government, especially NSA and similar.  So it's really just a question of whether you upset someone enough to want to bother going after you.

Check out this:

https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-008880

or

https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-009039