BREAKING: NEW YORK TIME WRITES COMPLETELY UNBIASED ARTICLE ABOUT GUNS!

[Elder Iptuous]

in the US (and i think it's mostly standardized across most of the civilized world, mostly)  you need a license to transmit.
you can get yourself whatever radio you want, and listen to whatever you want.  you just can't transmit until you have a valid callsign to identify your station with.  (and there's actually nazis that monitor everyone to make sure everything is up and up.  i mean hobbyists.  not people paid to...)

there's a thriving data scene in the ham world.  i've only scratched the surface of it.  i've just got into ham last year, but it's pretty slick.

the beginning licence over here lets you use the vhf/uhf bands which are shorter range.  but there's tons of repeaters out there that people operate.  you find a list of repeaters that people have set up on antenna towers that retransmit at a slightly higher or lower frequency than they receive.  your radio is set up to accomodate that so it monitors on one freq and transmits on the other.  that way you can have the advantage of using your little HT, and not having line of sight with the other guy talking on that repeater.  also, they have repeater networks.  we've got some that span the continent here in the states.  so even though you're talking on a cheaper radio, and only using the beginners license (it's called a 'tech' license here), you can still talk to people pretty far away.

if you get the general license, then you can use the hf bands, and bounce shit off the ionosphere, so you can talk to the other side of the globe.  i don't know how much data transmission goes on in those bands, as i haven't messed with it yet.
but i don't see why it wouldn't be possible....

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Pirate radio stations have gotten really clever about disguising their signal's origins; I know one who has somehow made it so that their signal transmits from an entire city block that has nothing to do with them. Not sure how they pulled that off, but they did!

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

There are a few ways you could do that.