Differences between US and UK Amateur Radio license rules and restrictions – part 4: New Ofcom license conditions for 2024 for UK licensees

In my previous posts comparing US Amateur Radio licence conditions with UK licences I looked at output power differences (part 1), geographic restrictions (part 2) and callsign formats (part 3). One area I have been particularly interested in over the past few years is packet radio (previous posts), packet BBSes (previous posts) and APRS usage, both topics until license changes in 2024 were significantly more restricted in the UK compared to US.

I don’t think there are any similar restrictions for any license level to run a packet radio node unattended in the US (see Part 97.219 Message Forwarding Systems. Beacon station are also permitted upto 100w in the US for any licence level), but in the UK up until 2024 with the recent license changes only a Full license holder was allowed to run an unattended station of any kind, which would include a repeater, a beacon, a packet radio mailbox, a BBS, or a packet radio node.

For 2024 in the UK, Foundation and Intermediate licensees can now run an unattended station as a new category of ‘Data Station’, which includes packet stations, but only upto 5w ERP. For upto 25w then a Full license is required.

Previously in the UK, a Notice of Variation (NoV) needed to be applied for to run an unattended data station, similar to repeaters, which if approved would grant a new callsign for the unattended station. This has also been relaxed in the 2024 changes where for up to 5w ERP you can run the station under your own personal callsign.

Full details of these changes are in Ofcom’s ‘Statement: Updating the amateur radio licensing framework’ doc here.

Deploying a Spring Boot app to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with the eb cli

Deploying a Spring Boot app to AWS Elastic Beanstalk is relatively easy using the eb cli tool, if you’re prepared to accept some defaults as part of the deploy. It’s probably possible to configure/customize IAM roles, Security Groups etc, but accepting the defaults is an easy way to deploy during development.

To initialize a new Elastic Beanstalk deployment, run in the root of your Spring Boot source folder:

eb init

Before creating the environment and deploying your app, edit the .elasticbeanstalk/config.yml that the previous step creates, to configure the built app jar to be deployed, by adding this section:

deploy:
artifact: target/your-app-jar-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

To create a single dev/test env with no load balancing:

eb create --single

To tear down the deployed ec2 instance running your Spring Boot app:

eb terminate

Skipping tests during Maven phases

If you’re running a Maven phase/goal and need to skip the execution of tests (because they’re temporarily failing), add one of the following options:

mvn -DskipTests phasename
mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true phasename

Normally you’d only continue with the build if the tests are passing, but sometimes you may have a valid reason to force the build to continue regardless.

These options are covered in the Maven docs here.