I got this email today from ACMA, the Australian communcations regulator who’s mailing list I subscribe to:

When I first started working, I’d often ride my motorbike to customer job sites with my cabling tools in a milk crate strapped on the back, but at no point did I combine customer cabling with riding the motorcycle – They seem like separate tasks.

So why does a motorbike race except certain people, equipment and cabling from the rules?

Will we see people on bikes traveling at great speed while crunching on Krone?

Leaning into the corners while working on lines?

Well, rather than doing my work I went down the rabbit hole to find out, and it started with ACMA gaving a handy link to the declaration in the email:

Which describes the area around the Philip Island GP track, as in the scope of Radiocommunications Equipment (General) Rules 2021 section 54A (2).

And the answer is actually pretty pedestrian.

Section 54A Exemption – devices used for significant events says:

If you’re just operating your widgets for the purpose of a significant event, it’s cool, you don’t need to worry about complying with ACMA’s Low interference potential devices (LIPD) class license standards.

Section 54A Exemption – devices used for significant events (Some liberty taken)

So why would this exist?

Well, 5 days after the MotoGP wraps up on Philip Island it’s in Malaysia.
I assume this loophole exists because there’s a lot of fancy telemetry stuff on the bikes, cameras, engine monitoring, lap time recording, and if MotoGP organizers had to get type-approval for everything and local cabling certification for everything, in every country the operate, when the race moves country to country each week, they’d never get approval for anything.

I did some research to see if this has been used before, and if so where, and came up short, this might be the first time this has been used:

What I did learn is if you’re a big enough wig (For example president of the US), you can get an exemption to the anti-jamming laws, which is used from time to time.

But as for the MotoGP being for their telemetry devices, this is just a guess, if anyone reading this knows definitively how this came to be, and where else this gets used, drop a comment – I’d be curious.