Ham radio do have a way to deal with abuse. I was part of the local LIC “Local Interference Committee” for several years. We used radio direction finding, transmitter fingerprinting and a few other things to hunt down people that abused the radio frequencies of amateur radio and police & fire frequencies. We would use base station beam antennas to get a rough idea of locations and then 3 or 4 of us would go out and park in the areas at the times the interference was normally going on (stupid people would usually do it roughly the same time every day) with Yagie (sp?), quads or doper antennas mounted on our cars and hunt down & document what we found. We would listen on the frequency the interference was happened and talk to each other on 220 MHz as most scanners don’t receive 220 and even if they did, it’s a very low use band, so no one was listening to us. We had copies of the databases of info on our laptops from the 9/11 building computers. It allowed us access to some interesting info that we probably really should not have had. But it allowed us to cross check things and get to the problem faster. When we would call the police dispatchers, higher up officials or other agencies, they seemed surprised we had the phone number to get a hold of them, sometimes asking how we got the number as it was very private.

It was like being a computer hacker & hunter at the same time. It was kinda fun to do; lots of serious things were happening, but still fun and rewarding knowing you are stopping a guy that is interfering with the police or fire departments.