From Hackaday:
The commission just levied a $180,000 fine on a company in Florida for selling audio/visual transmitters that use the ham bands as well as other frequencies.
The FCC charged that Lumenier Holdco LLC (formerly known as FPV Manuals LLC) was marketing uncertified transmitters some of which exceeded the 1-W power limit for ham transmitters used on model craft.
Equipment that is purely for ham use is normally exempt from certification, but since the equipment was able to operate on other frequencies, this was a violation. In addition, even for licensed ham use, some of the transmitters were using too much power.
The company stopped selling the units in question after an FCC inquiry back in April. We can’t help but think that in years past building a consumer product with a significant radio transmitter was a big task, and someone would bring up the FCC rules and certifications before much progress had been made. These days though you can easily acquire building block ICs and modules to field a product in a few weeks that would have taken a sophisticated team years of effort not long ago.
Comments
Specifically, it was because of a complaint, not an FCC van driving around searching for illegal products. The complainer could have been a government agency using another frequency or an internet commenter vigilante.
The specific violations were:
Various models of the AV transmitters marketed by Lumenier could operate on frequencies 1010, 1040, 1080, 1120, 1160, 1200, 1320, 1360, 2370, 2470, 2490, 2510, 5645, and/or 5945 MHz, all of which are outside of the authorized amateur radio service bands. See Second LOI Response attachment; see also 47 CFR § 97.301(a) (listing amateur frequencies).
97.215(c) (limiting transmitter power to 1 W).
The regulations are incredibly complex. There are plenty of video transmitters exceeding 1W for telemetry & repurposed radios sending over 1W for remote control. Different countries have different duty cycle requirements & bandwidth requirements.