Not if it’s amateur radio and public broadcasts.
Most military and police etc are now encrypted using the Tetra system so you can’t listen anyway.
Also the offence is not in listening but in acting on Information or trying to interrupt or delay the broadcast of that info.
Courty
I’m not sure it is in this context… I’ve seen a few people say it’s not legal in the UK, so I read the legislation: Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006, Section 48, and while I am not a legal professional this was my interpretation:
Paragraph 1a: is about intent to obtain the contents, sender or recipient of a message and not being the intended recipient.
Paragraph 1b: is about intent to disseminate the contents, sender or recipient of a message.
Paragraph 2: seems to be a caveat to the above that it only applies if the information would not have otherwise been obtainable.
In the context of personal listening you are probably breaking the law depending on what you are listening to:
Listening to a guy talking about the weather in Hull is probably not going to fall fowl of p.2. However listening to TfL’s Centre Comm which is a radio service used by the London Buses, which I understand is unencrypted, is likely breaking p.1 and p.2 because it’s information you’d not otherwise likely have received. Unless you act on this, record it, or share with someone else that you’ve been listening who is going to know?
However in the context of a web service for anyone to use SDR the person/organisation operating the radio receiver and broadcasting online is relaying information and because you don’t know what you are relaying it’s likely you will fall fowl of these rules at some point as you can’t predict what is and isn’t going to be transmitted until it’s happened.
It’s subject to a fine of up to £5,000.
I’m not trying to put you guys off, but it’s worth considering the legal issue here, additionally there is the potential to fall fowl of copyright.
As for Tetra, that wouldn’t be any different than above, other than potentially falling fowl of any UK DMCA-esk encryption breaking laws. However the Police Airwave system is would likely also fall under anti-terrorism laws, but given Tetra is encrypted by default, and Airwave is secure this isn’t a likely use of the SDR system.
To my point, you wouldn’t let a public SDR system tune into anything dodgy or attempt to break encryption and you definitely wouldn’t let it transmit.
There are multiple versions of SDR and normal radio receivers online and anything even vaguely contentious requires full verification and a proper licence (which I have anyway).
I don’t think anyone was recommending doing anything illegal, we were looking at the possibilities of joining a global network of listening posts (Which the physics of the arch has almost certainly killed anyway)
The UK has a huge number of SWL’s (short wave listeners) and scanner enthusiasts and has had for years, none of which are acting illegally. If you want to play with SDR and have a go yourself, have a look at http://www.websdr.org/
Courty