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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

I got my license in the 6th grade. Which wasn't all that long ago for me. We helped establish a local radio club. Like programming, amateur radio can be very intimidating, but isn't ultimately that complicated.

On a side note, megabit speeds on HAMNET? Holy Crap. Most packet radio only talks maybe 9600 baud max. Hmm. Come to think of it, Linux does have kernel-level AX.25 networking support... Anybody up for Quake over radio? :-P

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The FCC (i.e. US) has enshrined such baud rate limits into law, regardless of technical capabilities within the bandwidth used. I don't believe such a limit exists in Europe. It's pretty ridiculous and needs to get tossed out. Most hams only care about analog voice or Morse though so there isn't much pressure to make it happen.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/97.307

My only major concern about that is would the data encoding of quake be considered "encryption" in the eyes of the FCC?

Other than that, it'd be pretty cool to see that.

IIRC, according to the amateur radio rules as written by the FCC, you can use any encoding for amateur traffic, provided that it can be decoded using freely available software (by anybody who downloads the software, so don't be getting ideas about GPG), and QuakeWorld traffic most certainly can be. Although the fact that some of the datastream requires proprietary assets to be applied fully (player location, etc.), it may be a grey area, but I think it works. In which case, Xonotic, OpenArena, or Teeworlds would fit nicely. Although Xonotic uses the DarkPlaces network protocol, and I don't know how optimized for low speed the DP protocol is. Heck, for all I know, it's NetQuake derived.

It doesn't even need to be free (as in beer or speech) software... there are a number of popular proprietary protocols like DStar.

I kind of wish that weren't the case. At a minimum the protocol should be documented and unencumbered by patents.

Well, then, I'm in the clear. I guess I kind of have to do it now... we shall see...

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