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Given the recent California wildfires and the critical role that ham radio operators had in the rescue efforts, I would say that allowing ham radio operators to continue doing their thing is more of a utility and public service then say what Verizon does(which is to say that firefighters reached their "data limit" and had their cell phones data throttled during a critical emergency moment)

http://www.arrl.org/news/amateur-radio-volunteers-at-the-rea...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

Ham radio operators were also essential during 9/11.

http://www.arrl.org/files/file/WTC.pdf

But the car roads aren't congested—or, if they are, the bike path is so narrow that using it doesn't actually solve the problem in a long-term way. It's just that you don't need a license to ride a bike the way you do to drive a truck. That's the only (alleged) appeal of the bike lane.

And meanwhile, the people who fear semis using the bike lane (though the semis wouldn't fit anyway) are actually preventing pedal-assist e-bikes, which the younger spandex-wearing bicycle hobbyists would love to use.

pedal assist ebikes in bike lanes are quite dangerous. They are just faster, heavier bikes with less braking power.

I'm not saying your point is wrong, just that the analogy is bad.

Yeah, I somewhat intentionally picked it because it's ambiguous whether it's a good thing. I personally as a young(ish) person with a bicycle and a ham license would like both legal e-bikes and legal encryption :)

I share a bike lane with e-bikes fairly frequently and I feel way, way, way safer than I feel when sharing a lane with a truck.

Aren't they limited to 25km/h in most places (at least in Europe)? That's slower than many bikers can do.

Starting to see these arguments that ebikes should somehow be banned from cyclepaths or bike lanes a lot and not sure I agree at all. Virtually all ebikes sold in North America are limited to speeds achievable on a conventional bike, with most limited to 20mph. An average cyclist on even a cheap road bike can comfortably hit 20mph too if gradient is not too severe.

The faster “class 3” ebikes with 28mph top speeds are already banned from cycle paths pretty much everywhere.

I think we should just be happy more people are getting on bikes regardless. Pedal assist by definition is not a throttle - it’s not like the rider has a gas pedal they can leap on and accelerate like a sports car.

As others have said, I’d much rather share a lane with an ebike than a car or motorcycle! Huge speed differentials in the bike lane at times is already a fact of life given varying levels of rider fitness. Just do what most cyclists/ebikers do already - be a considerate rider.

Your argument that they have worse brakes is especially silly - almost all ebike systems only add 7-10kgs to total bike weight vs equivalent non ebike. There are far bigger variances just in rider weight alone. I’d argue ebikes typically have better brakes given most of them are sold with mid to high end hydraulic discs. Typical road bikes are often sold with significantly inferior rim brakes. Modern bicycle disc brakes are extremely good.

The question is not whether they have a higher top speed, but whether they are usually traveling the speed of traffic. Pedal assist bikes are usually going significantly faster than bikes in the same area. That's the point of them.

Additionally, that 20 pounds of extra weight is in an uncontrolled projectile. Person to person collisions are not as injurious as bike to person collisions even though bikes are just a fraction of the weight of the person, and that extra 20 pounds triples the weight of most bikes. Talking about rider weight misses the point.

Now you are really making things up as you go. 20lbs triples the weight of most bikes? That implies most bikes only weigh ~7lbs. You realise that is completely absurd, and would likely be close to a world record holder for lightest production bike?

Going faster than other riders is absolutely not the point of pedal assist. Most of them basically can’t thanks to the 20mph cut out. Of course many will find they can sustain a higher average speed below 20, but the point is travelling much the same kinds of speeds with much less effort.

Of course rider weight matters. One is rarely hit by a riderless bicycle. Rider weight is especially relevant in your claim that the brakes are worse too - whether the mass is in the rider or the bike frame is going to be largely inconsequential to stopping distances - the brakes still have to stop the combined weight of rider plus bike. Hence relevance of the small additional mass of small motor plus battery being dwarfed by variances in rider weight on normal bikes.

The fact that there are danger obstacles to the given mode of transportation shouldn't be considered as good enough reason to ban them outright - bicyclists regularly run red lights and stop signs, sometimes even striking and killing pedestrians. Yet, we still create bike lanes and don't ban them outright, because they are good.

Same for trucks, which run over pedestrians and bicyclists with startling regularity.

Same for motorcycles, which kill their drivers with startling regularity.

I don't think "quite dangerous" is valid for banning outright. Maybe "dangerous all of the time no matter what," such as drunk driving, or driving the wrong way on a road, or cycling on the freeway.

Anyway, you can always add regulation. Requiring passengers in cars to wear seatbelts made cars less dangerous. Requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets made motorcycles less dangerous. Giving bicycles bicycle lanes and their own signals made bicycling safer. Etc. Put a speed limit on the bicycle lanes - no faster than 25mph, say. Maybe force e-bike companies to put limiters on the bikes, but that sucks for when they want to ride on the road at whatever speed they can pull off. Then, actually enforce the rules, which I don't know how to go about doing, because the cops in my jurisdiction for example don't give a fuck about neither cars parked in bike lanes (even in "no parking at any time" zones!) or bicyclists sprinting through reds/stop signs.

I say this as someone that owns only 2 wheeled vehicles, motorized or otherwise.

If the 30 extra pounds of weight of an e-bike is a safety issue, we should ban overweight people from bicycling.

If an e-bike hitting 25 km/h is a safety issue, we should, likewise, ban fit people from bicycling.

The ebikes sold where I live go no faster than a very low speed (think ~20km/h) and have very robust brakes (double, not sensitive to weather conditions). They are in every way safer than the racing bike people who frequently go 40-50km/h and have brakes that are sensitive to weather conditions. And they are actually fine also.

In VLM's analogy, the bike lane is entirely separate from the regular road (he said "deconflicted"). What he's talking about there is an entirely separate bike path, not a "bike lane" that's a part of a regular road with different paint. They're also frequently called trails.

It is possible for a semi-truck to drive on such a path, barely (they're usually 8 feet wide; these paths are driven on occasionally by service vehicles after all, to construct and repair the path), but they'd have to run over all the bollards, and any bridges wouldn't handle their weight. Otherwise, it's a fairly accurate analogy IMO. No, it's not a very good solution to the problem of traffic on the roads, but for a few jerks it might seem like a good shortcut. (This is similar to how amateur radio bands don't have very much spectral bandwidth.)

Not sure I agree with the analogy. I haven't seen Pactors mowing down other users by broadcasting over them. Is this really a problem? Also it's worth pointing out that there are separate frequency allocations for voice vs data e.g. 14.0 Mhz to 14.1 is data only and from there up it's voice only. Sure, other data protocols might get stomped on but that applies to any data transmission, not just Pactor.

Also the semi vs bicycle thing isn't really valid. Pactor is around 2.4khz bandwidth while voice is 3khz. So it's more like a bicyle vs another bicycle.

I've posted a longer explanation of the core of the issue in another thread here. This has been going on since the 90s.

> Pactor is around 2.4khz bandwidth while voice is 3khz

The whole reason that voice isn't allowed in the data bands is it's so wide.

FT-8 is only 50Hz wide, Morse code is ~100Hz. In the space of a single Pactor you can fit 48 FT-8 transmissions or 20+ morse code.

If we wanted progress we could look at repealing the symbol rate limits rather than just scaling up the bandwidth of a signal[1].

[1] http://www.arrl.org/pactor-iii

I think "semi" is analogous to "commercial interests" as "bicycle" is to "recreational user".

A bigger issue is RM-11831 would also ban DMR, P25, and pretty much every digital mode used on VHF as well, because of its open source requirement, every ham digital mode uses codecs from DVSI.

Yes that's pretty much how DSTAR got banned in France.

My guess, or hope, for how it'll roll out is something like grandfathering in the closed source copyrighted codecs while banning all future closed codecs. Or sunset the closed source codecs in 2039 or similar.

Also note the non-voice digital modes will be AFAIK mostly unaffected. All the classic modes, the K1JT open source modes for meteor scatter, EME and general contesting, all OK.

Are there any open, or at least out of patent protocols for use? As for encryption, what would be wrong with at least enough of the message being an open header...

    id: UUID
    from: user@CALLSIGN 
    to: user@CALLSIGN
    content: XXX

Content encrypted if both from and to have an associated keybase.io entry, for example.

At least then you can identify the callsign via open protocol? content would include additional headers and encoded body content.

The idea is there shouldn’t be encryption. The ham spectrum is intended to be for educational and hobby use, and for emergency communications. If the message is for commercial use or for something that needs to be encrypted then it should be on a portion of the spectrum reserved for commercial or government use. The only exception to this is controlling satellites. That’s how the rules are written, and the reasoning behind that is to make sure there’s always good chunks of spectrum available for that kind of hobby, research, and free personal use.

Reading in other threads, it seems there are amateur bands that do allow for encrypted transmissions, correct?

In any case, it seems like a lot of the suggested use cases could easily be unencrypted digital messages with a crypto signature part for confirming the sender to control systems.

Nope, none of the amateur bands allow encryption.

There are “unlicensed” (technically licensed-by-rule) bands that do. Typically the ISM bands, which is what WiFi uses. But they aren't as open for experimental use as the amateur bands.

(But yes, even on amateur bands a digital signature would be fine. You just can't obscure the meaning of the message.)

If I'm honest, it's weird that folks are pushing an internet dichotomy between "hobbyist" and "encryption" in 2019.

Ham radio was explicitly never meant to be private - if you're trying to communicate and don't want someone snooping on your conversation, you can pick up a phone or find some other channel instead. It should be possible for all stations to receive messages on the ham bands, and encryption is entirely orthogonal to that goal.

Also, it's worth noting that some cryptography is allowed, just nothing that obscures the message - say you have a device which can be remotely controlled via radio and want to send it a control message ("turn on relay 1" for example), you're allowed to cryptographically sign your message to authenticate that it came from you - just not encrypt the message body.

So the bicyclists claim “when the bridge collapses and the semis can’t carry mail and freight, we’ll do that important job. We provide a necessary utility.”

So the bridge fails one day in a storm and the bicycle owners are all handed 200-lb loads and told “go.”

Are they compelled to go? What if they all refuse? Where is the utility now?

> Are they compelled to go?

They are compelled by their own morals. As it's been proven time and again, whenever a bridge collapses, those bikers carrying 200lb loads are among the very first responders.

Utilities don't operate on moral compulsion. They operate on schedules and strive for reliability.

Let's extend the analogy. Say the bridge is going to be out for 2 years and the bicyclists need to carry loads 24/7. They'll need to quit their regular day jobs to do it.

Are they still compelled to go?

Ever heard of volunteer fire departments?

HAMs are not FEMA. They're a purely volunteer op. They do what they can, the best way they can, which turns out to be very good and very reliable in practice. Read up on HAM emergency communications; people participating in it treat it very seriously.

I wouldn't think this would be so hard to understand here, on this site. HAM emergency response works the same way the best of Open Source projects work - through people who do things out of passion and kindness for others, and not because of economic incentives.

To say that firefighters aren't at least in part motivated by helping people isn't very charitable.

A perfect HN automobile analogy

I think you've got at least one of perfectly spherical, elastic and impenetrable.

Given how many people hate cyclists, this might not be the best analogy.

Actually, it seems like a pretty good analogy for many reasons, including that one. The same will happen with amateur radio bands: it'll be easy to convince "many people" that hams are a bunch of freeloaders hogging valuable spectrum, and that we should let corporate interests use this spectrum instead.

> Given how many Americans hate cyclists

FTFY