Export Administration Regulations

I was surprised to be faced by the attached message when attempting to check-out a spectrum analyzer. This message seems deeply puzzling to me for two reasons:

— IIUC, 3A992.a only means “Electronic test equipment not controlled by 3A002”, and such it is completely unremarkable and applies to anything down to a $10 Harbor Freight multimeter. I mean, I can understand trying to cover yourself in case someone thinks it’s a good idea to re-export anything to North Korea, Iran or Syria without checking, but isn’t that a bit of an overly scary message to present?
— Why are the tracking gens not presented with the same message when IIUC, they would classify as at least 3A992.a as well?

Any light you could shed on the reason for this message would be very reassuring for me. By the way, great job on making the BB60C 3A992.a, I enjoyed that post.

Thanks in advance,
Robert

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Hi Robert,
You are correct. ECCN 3A992.a is completely unremarkable and simply means that in addition to the standard embargoed countries of Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Syria, and North Korea, there is one additional country, Sudan, that these products cannot be shipped to without an export license. Yes, all of our products are correctly assigned ECCN 3A992.a. In fact, I submitted a commodity jurisdiction request to the US State Department for the BB-series spectrum analyzers and it was returned with the assigned ECCN of 3A992.a.

Now the “why”: in the past, we have had several shipments of our products that were delivered to freight forwarders without our knowledge. There are many freight forwarding companies whose name obscures that they are a freight forwarder. Where did each shipment go? I hope it went to the stated destination provided by the buyer. But simply hoping that they were not illegally diverted to an embargoed or trade restricted country is an inadequate defense. So it is prudent to notify our customers that the spectrum analyzer they are buying has some trade restrictions. Doing so IS legally adequate when selling to destinations in the USA, provided it is not a freight forwarder. We carefully scrutinize shipments going to freight forwarders now to minimize the risk of diversion.

Why do we not make the same notification to customers when selling our generators. Because, in our judgement, there is less interest in diverting our generators as compared to our spectrum analyzers. So, again, you are correct: Our generators also fall under the ECCN of 3A992.a, but I perceive far less risk of diversion for our generators so we don’t post the same notification when selling them.

I hope I haven’t given too lengthy an explanation. Anything involving export control is never a short explanation.

If you were involved in signals work (it was a particular university class at a very particular university for me) you could see the value of a device like a real time spectrum analyzer being used for intercept work.

Before you could benefit from LPI/LPE (low probability of intercept/ exploitation) for traffic that you wanted to keep secure.

Won’t go much more in to that.

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