Am I right to assume that it's easy to locate the source of ham radio signals?
i.e. if there's a blanket ban, can you use your radio hidden in your house or can the government easily find out that the user they've noticed on the airwaves is located there and knock down your door?
> can the government easily find out that the user they've noticed on the airwaves is located there and knock down your door?
Sadly, yes. A bunch of SDRs spread over the whole country with precise clocks or a scheme like the one used in ADS-B MLAT reception (that's based on using the internal SDR clocks without requiring precise clocks on the host) is enough to use multilateration to hone in on any kind of signal, even looking up in raw signals in the past.
If I were to guess, I'd assume that even in nominal democracies the secret agencies are already running such monitoring stations so it's probably already the case that, should need be, all communications can be triangulated.
The HF bands are all small enough to be sampled whole with a single cheap RTL-SDR each, a KiwiSDR can sample literally all of them at the same time, only the VHF/UHF bands need more dedicated equipment (e.g. a BladeRF) - all of that is inside the range that hobbyists can easily afford.
The units used for detecting and locating clandestine transmitters started WW2 as large truck mounted facilities to hand carried units (with antennas) that fit inside suitcase-sized containers.
Modern ham groups engage in transmitter hunting as part of organized events. Bunny hunting and fox hunting are alternate names for such activities.
i.e. if there's a blanket ban, can you use your radio hidden in your house or can the government easily find out that the user they've noticed on the airwaves is located there and knock down your door?