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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

That rule is there to prevent people from misusing the amateur radio frequencies for commercial reasons.

In practice, HTTPS and SSH are commonly used in the HAMNET for administrative purposes (many devices do not offer anything else, even).

Source: HAMNET operator. Ask me anything!

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I was surprised to hear this -- my understanding was that encryption was illegal in all cases (at least in the US). A quick googling found this, which sheds a good bit of light on the matter: http://www.amateurradio.com/encryption-is-already-legal-its-...

Technically 97.113(a)(5) takes care of commercial use where if you can use another service (aircraft radio, maritime radio, broadcast, CB, land mobile, whatever) then you're required to use it, and not use ham radio. Its to maintain the hobby-ness of ham radio.

WRT to your "administrative purposes" 97.219(d)(1) not only permits HTTPS and SSH, but requires it, in order to authenticate, presumably so unidentified or unauthorized people can't reconfigure your transmitter on top of the local air traffic control or something. Under 97.309(b) as long as you don't obscure the meaning you're all good. Obviously accessing administrative URLs is not an obscure meaning. Likewise tunneling a VPN trying to mimic administrative traffic to do illegal file downloading or something would be obscuring meaning.

Some people like the tech more than the rules, but in HAM radio it seems that group is the minority.

I think the point is that with encryption it would be entirely impossible to enforce a number of the other rules, such as that one.

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