Amateur-radio regulatory compliance¶

The moment an aprscaching instance keys a transmitter — digipeating, IGating, running a node or BBS, forwarding store-and-forward mail, or carrying federation over the air — it operates in the amateur radio service, and amateur rules apply to every frame it sends. This chapter maps the constraints that shape the platform and shows where aprscaching enforces them for you and where responsibility stays with you.

This is not legal advice. Amateur regulations differ by country and change over time. You are the control operator of your station and are solely responsible for its transmissions. Verify everything here against your own licence conditions and national authority (US FCC Part 97, CEPT/ECC in Europe, and your national telecom regulator).

You are the control operator¶

aprscaching is software; the licence is yours. Nothing the platform or its users do relieves the station's control operator of responsibility for what leaves the antenna. Two controls make that tractable:

Transmit is off by default and gated. Browser and RF transmit are disabled until the callsign is control-verified; the APRS-IS passcode verifies nothing and is never the gate. See RF ingest & transports.
Receiving never obligates transmitting. RX is always safe and never lifts trust (Core concepts); enabling automatic TX (digipeat, beacon, forward) is a separate, explicit, per-port opt-in.

No encryption on the air — sign, never conceal¶

Amateur rules broadly prohibit transmitting messages encoded to obscure their meaning. This is the single hardest constraint on carrying an application protocol over RF, and aprscaching is built around it:

aprscaching signs; it does not encrypt. Federation feed pages, signed tombstones, account-move records, device-key find signatures, and tool-manifest signatures are all digital signatures — they authenticate origin and integrity. They do not conceal content: the payload stays in the clear and is fully readable off the air. Signing for authentication is permitted; encrypting for secrecy is not.
Confidentiality degrades to omission, never to ciphertext. Any field the platform withholds for privacy — fed_scope owner-field redaction, or any non-public payload — is dropped before it reaches an RF binding, never encrypted onto it. An RF transport binding MUST NOT carry ciphertext.
Secrets never touch the air. The ingest secret, the session HMAC key, per-operator peer keys, and VAPID keys are internet-side authentication only. They are not transmitted, and RF paths carry no credential material.

The practical result: everything aprscaching would put on the air is already public, signed, and inspectable — which is exactly what keeps it legal.

Station identification¶

Automatic stations must identify with their callsign at the interval your regulator requires. Every APRS/AX.25 frame aprscaching sends carries its source callsign, and beacon/identification intervals for the digipeater, IGate, node, and beacons are operator-configured in apps/ingest. Set them to satisfy your national identification rule.

Automatic & unattended operation¶

A digipeater, IGate, NET/ROM (and FlexNet/TheNet/BayCom) node, BBS, store-and-forward mail path, and any automatic federation-over-RF relay are automatically-controlled stations. National rules restrict where and how these run — permitted band segments, power, occupied bandwidth, and the requirement that a control operator be reachable. aprscaching's part:

automatic transmit (digipeat / beacon / forward / relay) is opt-in per port, never implicit;
duty-cycle and rate limits are configurable on each transmit port in apps/ingest;
the tiered RF transport negotiator chooses only the record encoding and batch size for a link's capability — it never selects a band, segment, or power level on your behalf.

Third-party traffic & message handling¶

Relaying messages on behalf of other people ("third-party traffic") is restricted, and international third-party handling is permitted only with specific countries. aprscaching's third-party encapsulation puts the licensed user's callsign as the on-air source (}USERCALL>APZACG,…) while your gateway is the sending station. When you forward others' BBS mail or carry federation records that originated at other operators' stations, you remain responsible for meeting your country's third-party rules and any applicable international agreements.

No commercial or pecuniary traffic¶

The amateur service is non-commercial. aprscaching's donations are recognition-only and never gate features, so nothing that looks like paid promotion rides the air; cache content and federation records carry no advertising. Keep it that way on any RF binding.

Bandwidth, band plans, and high-speed modes¶

aprscaching is field-first — 1200-baud AFSK and 9600-baud G3RUH on VHF/UHF, 300-baud on HF — and also supports high-bandwidth modes (HAMNET microwave IP, robust HF, and internet-side AXIP/AXUDP). Symbol-rate, occupied-bandwidth, and band-segment rules for these differ widely by country and band. The operator decides which ports and bands are enabled; the platform adapts its encoding to whatever link you turn on, but it does not choose the RF parameters for you.

44net (AMPRNet) and HAMNET¶

44net is amateur IP address space and HAMNET is an amateur microwave IP backbone. Traffic on them is still amateur radio: no content encryption, callsign identification, and control-operator rules all apply, exactly as on a 1200-baud packet channel. Where a HAMNET or 44net segment bridges to the general internet, the amateur-service boundary sits at that RF/gateway edge — you are responsible for what crosses it in each direction.

What aprscaching enforces, and what stays yours¶

aprscaching provides	You own
Signs, never encrypts; confidentiality degrades to field-drop	Confirming that satisfies your regulator
Transmit off by default, gated on control-verification	Being the reachable, responsible control operator
Per-port opt-in for automatic TX; configurable duty-cycle/rate	Choosing enabled bands, ports, power, and segments
Callsign in every frame; configurable ID/beacon intervals	Setting intervals to your national ID rule
Third-party encapsulation preserving the originating callsign	Meeting third-party and international-traffic rules
Recognition-only donations; no commercial payloads	Keeping your on-air content non-commercial

Again: not legal advice. These are the mechanisms aprscaching gives you to operate within the rules — meeting them at your station, on your bands, under your licence, is your responsibility as control operator.