NoVs Changes for UK Intermediate Amateur Radio Operators

UK Amateur / Ham Radio Intermediate licence holders will no longer be able to apply for Notices of Variation to their licence for Repeaters or Internet Gateways, existing NoV's will not be renewed

“In the past, the spectrum regulator permitted the variation of Intermediate licences. We are phasing that out. We shall not grant new variations to Intermediate licensees and existing variations will not be renewed when they expire. This will return us to the position where only Full licensees enjoy these privileges. This typically involves variations for repeaters and internet gateways.”

— Ofcom Website

Information regarding who can apply for a Amateur / Ham Radio Licence Variation - 
http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/radiocommunication-licences/amateur-radio/faq/1498947

Amateur Radio Vanity Call Sign Fee to Disappear in September

The Amateur Radio vanity call sign regulatory fee is set to disappear in the next few weeks. According to the best-available information from FCC sources, the first day that applicants will be able to file a vanity application without having to pay a fee is Thursday 3rd September 2015.

In deciding earlier this year to drop the regulatory fee components for Amateur Radio vanity call signs and General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) applications, the FCC said it was doing so to save money and personnel resources. The Commission asserted that it costs more of both to process the regulatory fees and issue refunds than the amount of the regulatory fee payment.

"Our costs have increased over time, and now that the costs exceed the amount of the regulatory fee, the increased relative administrative cost supports eliminating this regulatory fee category," the FCC said in its Report and Order, which appeared on July 21 in The Federal Register. "Once [it's] eliminated, these licensees will no longer be financially burdened with such payments, and the Commission will no longer incur these administrative costs that exceed the fee payments."

The FCC raised the Amateur Service vanity call sign regulatory fee from $16.10 to its current $21.40 for the 10-year license term in 2014. The $5.30 increase was the largest such fee hike in many years. In a typical fiscal year, the FCC collected on the order of $250,000 in vanity call sign regulatory fees.

The FCC said the revenue it would otherwise collect from such regulatory fees "will be proportionally assessed on other wireless fee categories." Congress has mandated that the FCC collect nearly $340 million in regulatory fees from all services in fiscal year 2015.

Low Cost Device lets Hackers Hijack Satellite and Amateur Radio Satellite Communications

Satellite tracking technology can be easily hacked with the help of a $1,000 device made of off the shelf components, according to a security researcher who found a flaw in the technology.

Taking advantage of this flaw, criminal hackers could track and hijack valuable cargo, such as military supplies or cash and gold stored in an armored car, according to Colby Moore, a researcher at security firm Synack, who plans to show off his findings at the upcoming Black Hat security conference.

Moore claims that the communications between trackers sold by GlobalStar and its constellation of satellites is insecure, allowing pretty much anyone to intercept it and even send its own spoofed signal to the satellites. This flaw, according to Moore, shows that satellite companies like GlobalStar aren’t taking basic steps to make their technologies secure.

“We’re only at the tip of the iceberg for the implications around this. It’s really critical that these companies start taking security seriously. It’s really critical that these companies start taking security seriously.” - Colby Moore

GlobalStar markets its satellite tracking devices to corporations and government agencies that want to track their valuable assets. They can also be used to monitor industrial critical infrastructure such as pipelines, or to track hikers and other adventurers who use GlobalStar’s consumer tracker called “Spot.”

All these devices, according to Moore, depend on the same, flawed technology, known as the Simplex data network, which is used to send data between the transmitters and the satellites.

More said he was able to reverse engineer the protocol underlying the network and find that all these devices use the same code to transmit data, making it “very easy’ to intercept data flowing from the devices to the satellites.

Full story -
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-1000-device-lets-hackers-hijack-satellite-communications