Hams try to re-carve the amateur radio spectrum | Hacker News Reader

Hams try to re-carve the amateur radio spectrum

theregister.co.uk

58 pointslightlyused27 comments

Awful article that misses the point.

Vendors like Yaesu and D-Link have introduced digital modes that are proprietary and/or patented, but not encrypted. The NSA will have no trouble decrypting these symbols, but hams who have D-Link radios can't read the Yaesu transmissions and vice versa.

Hams are doing a lot of interesting stuff that is open in terms of "digital" modes that work like teletype -- today these are more spectrum efficient than the old Morse code and make it possible to communicate between modest stations by bouncing signals off the moon. The problem is with proprietary protocols for fitting digital voice in narrow channels.

BTW, that Rappaport guy might be the #1 researcher in the field of millimeter wave radio these days

In general, amateur radio transmissions ought to be open and unencrypted -- the equivalent of GPL or public domain. There are some instances where the legal ban on encryption is an issue, such as when HAMs come to the aid of emergency management after a natural disasters and cannot pass personally identifying information or patient information in the clear without violating HIPAA. A common-sense exception allowing encryption in these cases makes complete sense and is something the FCC commissioner could probably approve by edict in lieu of legislation on the matter.

I'm pretty sure that in the event of a natural disaster, HIPAA would accept that saving lives is more important than preserving patient privacy.

This exception already exists in current regulations.

Yup. http://www.hdscs.org/hipaa.html

Yeah, I don't really get where this article is going. All digital signals are required to publish how to decode and D-Star that was called out was designed specifically by hams.

My guess is this is just a push back against pactor and the non ham usage that tends to happen. Either way ham isn't going to be breaking any data rates soon as the frequency used is to small for faster symbols(and they're also prohibited but current laws).

The voice codec for Dstar is proprietary and patented. Luckily it's about to expire and I've seen at least one reverse engineered implementation.

Still, it completely goes against the spirit of a hobby and is an intentional legal and technical barrier to decoding transmissions, today.

Yes. D-Star is the poster-child for the kind of coding scheme that should not be allowed in Amateur Radio. If I can't access the documentation required to do a compatible open implementation, then it is a no-go.

There are some methods that are patent encumbered and the only source of ways to decode them are with tightly controlled modems/decoders. This is especially the case with the advanced PACTOR modems and some of the digital voice encoders. The FCC considered patented methods to be open even if there are no available methods to decode them.

> All digital signals are required to publish how to decode

This is not true.

It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general. This goes for everything from driving to manually deploying a rollback to your software to ham radio. If we really need encrypted communications in emergencies (and I buy that we do, tbh), we should be using encrypted communications for everyday conversations so we're comfortable with how to turn it on, what the failure modes are, how we handle authentication and key distribution, etc. And I mean everyday conversations, not just emergency practice events.

See also this USENIX paper about how police with encrypted radios (who are legally allowed and generally expected to encrypt their traffic all the time) end up turning off encryption because it doesn't work reliably or easily: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec11/tech/full_papers/C... I have trouble believing that in a disaster, any significant portion of hams will manage to set up encryption.

This is an important point and probably why even the US military doesn’t always elect to encrypt comms/control/telemetry.

Encryption without proper key management is security theater, and proper key management is hard. Just rolling it out into an ecosystem that has never had to accommodate its idiosyncracies is a recipe for trouble...particularly when the cost of malfunction could be life and limb.

HIPAA wasn’t designed for exceptional circumstances. Given the choice between letting a few radio nerds overhear that your kid was severely burned in a wildfire and needs immediate evacuation or letting them suffer longer b/c some certificate expired on a relay, most would choose the former.

That said, if folks are willing to take the risk, you could potentially implement some kind of key escrow system so that comms are tactically protected but still subject to scrutiny.

Lastly digital signatures employ cryptography, rules should be implemented in a way to still allow for that to occur.

> It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general.

This is why you will hear the Hospital Net on the the N6NFI repeater every month. Here's the Net Control Operator script:

https://www.scc-ares-races.org/hospital/docs/HospitalNetScri...

If you listen to the net some night, you might hear operators checking in from each hospital saying "No traffic, we sent a packet." Which sounds pretty boring, but confirms two things: the ham radio station at that hospital has successfully completed a voice communication (obviously, because they are talking with Net Control), and they have also successfully sent a message to a designated packet radio address and had it confirmed.

That's about as uninteresting as it gets, until the real emergency happens and everyone is glad you've been practicing this every month.

It's also why, when you see a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/Baofeng/ saying "I want to get one of these cheap handhelds for emergency communication, I know I'm not allowed to transmit unless it's a real emergency, but I can listen in the meantime and then I will have the radio on hand just in case," there will always be replies like "Get your Technician license! It's not that hard - many people study for half a day or less - and then you can practice transmitting on the ham bands, so you know you will be able to operate the radio."

I disagree wholeheartedly. Ham radio cannot limit itself to unencrypted communications in the modern era. Radio communication is no longer limited to electrical engineers spending thousands of dollars on big boat anchors, as it was in the mid 20th century. It's not a fringe activity anymore. Virtually every American has a cell phone, and we all use our cell phones every day, and our cell phones primarily make encrypted transmissions.

One of the stated goals in Part 97 is for amateur radio to "contribute to the advancement of the radio art". How is ham radio accomplishing that goal and contributing to the bleeding edge of radio science, when it's illegal to use a modern bleeding edge radio on the ham bands?

Encryption is a necessary property of modern radio communications. If ham radio wants to remain modern, it must allow encryption. Conversely, if we don't allow encryption, it will not remain modern.

The real problem is that it makes using https over packet radio 'illegal'; as well as any other TLS service and ssh.

> In general, amateur radio transmissions ought to be open and unencrypted -- the equivalent of GPL or public domain.

What are your reasons for that assertion?

Imagine if someone suggested that all noncommercial messages over Wifi should be unencrypted and public domain, because it's a shared resource. They'd be laughed out of the room.

If your concern is about identifying abusers of shared spectrum then simply require that all messages be prefixed with the cleartext/speech sending station code.

There are two different issues we don't want to conflate. Encrypted traffic is a problem because once you allow it, there is no way to police abuse of the spectrum (in the same way you can tunnel almost anything over ssh). If you allow encryption, then the ham spectrum just becomes an open free for all.

The second issue is proprietary protocols. If the goal is to support experimentation and emergencies then all protocols used should be non proprietary so that all who want can learn and be involved.

The biggest problem I see is this big push into proprietary digital modes is that it creates incompatibility. These digital modes splits the market up into incompatible segments that damages the ability to communicate. This splintering reduces the desirability of a new radio, and reduces sales. Reduced sales means vendors spend less on R&D.

Who wants to buy a digital radio that can only communicate with a small fraction of other digital radios?

I've talked to dozens of hams, and their most hated feature is accidentally entering digital mode on their radio and not being able to communicate with anyone. Similarly the majority of repeaters are analog only, because who wants to put up a repeater that only a small fraction of the radios can use?

If the FCC required only open systems being used then any radio could use open software to be able to communicate and help ham radio become a more modern radio system.

As a counter argument to keeping everything open there's a bunch of things you want encrypted. Radio controlled things. This is even a problem for the people that are trying to create HAM internet connections. You can't use any SSL. Though it'd be slow, I'd love to see a world wide internet that could be accessed by HAM. I can't think of anything more world changing than having an open internet that everyone can reach with a $10 device.

So I think there are cases where being able to use encryption would be nice. But there are also plenty of cases to keep things open. So maybe we need to talk about some compromise. Maybe keeping certain bands open and others not.

The rule against encryption on ham bands doesn't prohibit digital signatures. It just prohibits encryption of message content.

For radio control a protocol that sends commands in the clear but signs them should be sufficient to let you securely control something without violating the rules.

From my understanding because of this limitation you can't send encrypted passwords.

Which is why you have to use other protocols and key authentication. Whatever the current equivalent of Cram-MD5 or just plain public key HMACS. I wrote about this 15 years ago in April 2004 - https://rietta.com/blog/2009/08/17/authentication-without-en...

A ham radio license enables you to transmit encrypted messages only when operating a space radio station or remote aircraft which is something, but not much.

Ham radio been a regulatory success because the transmissions are open. Self-policing of the ham bands has always been an essential part of the hobby. Any transmissions using unpublished algorithms make that impossible.

In today's climate, the fact that long-established (and offshore) gear makers are creating such a threat is not surprising but is dismaying. One serious criminal mis-use could cause serious damage to goodwill generated over decades. It could lead to more draconian regulations.

Emergency use is a side-issue. We should not allow ourselves to be divided by it.

I am an Extra class licensee in the US and while I have a lot of respect for the Ham community, deeply entrenched thinking places the future of amateur radio in jeopardy. If we only allow CW and SSB phone as truly open and accessible operating modes a whole world of technical innovation and integration will be lost. While the letter of the FCC rules might exclude some of the more recent digital modes listed, the traffic is not encrypted. With all the strong encryption out there in the world, it's hard to buy amateur radio as a threat to national security unless we're worried that a bunch of 80 year olds are going to take up arms against the republic.

To me it sounds like some operators have sour grapes because they can't immediately listen to everybody's traffic. In short I support Ham moving forward and not becoming even more antiquated than it is.

I do think the headline of the article is poorly written as I don't think this is about spectrum allocation in any way.

The article is rather badly written, but the actual petition for rulemaking is broadly reasonable. The proposed language change to 97.309 is as follows:

An amateur station transmitting a RTTY or data emission using a digital code specified in this paragraph may use any technique whose technical characteristics have been documented publicly, and the protocol used can be be monitored, in it’s entirety, by 3rd parties, with freely available open source software, for the purpose of facilitating communications

As I see it, the essential goal is to close the loophole whereby theoretically-open but practically-closed protocols can be used on amateur frequencies.

There is a broader debate in amateur radio about the use of automated data stations and the possible increase in the bandwidth limit, both of which represent delicate balances. There's clearly a cohort of geriatrics who want to keep double sideband voice and ban data, but there are also genuine issues with the behaviour of some data mode users.

A significant number of WSJT users are now transmitting at high power, creating significant issues with interference. WinLink is an absolute nuisance - it has always been illegal in the UK and I really can't see how it's legal in the US.

https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/100918881206/PETITION%20FOR%20R...

https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7521098786.pdf

Wow, are we sure this article wasn't written in 1980? The idea that encrypted radio is a national security threat makes zero sense in the age of VPNs and Tor. If someone wants to get a secret message overseas an encrypted HAM transmission is probably the single hardest way to do that short of trying to train a carrier pigeon with a portrait of Vladimir Putin.

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