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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

As much as I'd love to have more people in amateur radio, and the ability to use encryption, I think both the licensing and prohibition on encryption are fairly critical to keeping things running smoothly.

The test includes lots of useful information such as requirements to transmit your callsign and using minimum power necessary.

The prohibition on encryption is pretty critical to enforce other rules such as only using it for non-commercial purposes. Encryption isn't actually necessary for any of the stated purposes of amateur radio (experimentation, recreation, training, contesting, emergency comms, etc). You can still use any digital mode, including digital signatures, but not encryption of the content.

I might be in favor of creating a class lower than Technician, and allowing taking the test online, though. You should still be assigned a callsign that you are required to transmit.

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> Encryption isn't actually necessary for any of the stated purposes of amateur radio (experimentation, recreation, training, contesting, emergency comms, etc)

It is, or will be, needed for experimentation. Wireless security cannot be an afterthought anymore; communication modes and protocols need to be built with security in mind from day 1.

There is one area where encryption is expressly permitted in amateur radio: satellite control, for obvious reasons. The future of amateur radio is not people talking to people over narrowband voice channels; it's going to be machines talking to other machines, and being able to control them. This is going to require encryption, or innovation will shift off the ham bands. And if the ARS is just ragchews, contesting, and doing things that have already been done instead of advancing communication, then there's not much defense when someone like Thales comes in and suggests reallocating bandwidth to something new and enterprising.

A few points:

Encryption isn't typically part of the physical or data link layers, which are the bread and butter of amateur radio. What you send on top of those isn't really the interesting part of amateur radio, from a technical perspective.

The actual rule prohibits "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning" which I think most people interpret to mean digital signatures for authentication and integrity are permitted, just not encrypted payloads.

Many protocols have the ability to switch ciphers, including disabling encryption entirely while still performing authentication and integrity checking.

A use case I want out of amateur radio regulation is private anonymous communication traceable only via motivated actors using triangulation etc to a physical broadcast point, which may be moving and not always on.

I want this not for commercial or nefarious reasons (though it would be used for such and I don't care) but because I want some attempt at private-by-default in everything, even just experimenting or recreational. The edge cases where I'd want maximum openness, like in emergencies, are rare, so shouldn't be the default. It's not going to happen I know, but it's what it'd take to bring me into it and I presume more competent philosophical aligned people (there's a few in the overall threads) who could use the lessened restrictions for actual societal innovation (positive or negative).

My comments are limited to the US because these things are managed differently in different countries.

Given how much the spectrum landscape is changing (i.e. 5G), I think we should rework how strictly we allocate spectrum, especially lower-power/ lower frequency stuff. I should be able to create a broadcast radio station with X mile radius pretty easily. Is X=30mi? I cannot say, but the intense regulations are onerous, and I think the recent decline in local journalism might be reversed by an increase in local broadcast radio.

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