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Comment by state_less | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and I can't talk with other radios either, I need to talk to a provider's cell tower. I have to drop down something ancient like a VHF radio to do peer to peer communication at long range.

PS. If I'm wrong, please let me know. I'd love to hear about any developments in long range P2P wireless phones.

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I do Aether (P2P Reddit~ish, https://getaether.net) and I investigated doing something like this over radio mesh networks. Specifically doing it over HAM radio was one of the possibilities. The plan was something like doing anycast over Radio.

Turns out, even those bands do have a lot of limitations. For example you cannot use any encryption, which makes most of the modern tools out of the picture because TLS is impossible. There are some workarounds like doing TLS with blank keys, but far as I understand it is dicey so far as legality goes. (The data on Aether is public, but we use encryption tools for authentication of messages.)

What does TLS with blank keys give you over plaintext?

I can see how it’s not obvious, but the parentheses at the end are the answer to that (or maybe they were edited in after your question). You can use TLS without ciphering but with signatures to authenticate messages.

That's a really stupid thing about cell phones. We all carry these amazing radios with us, but they become completely useless once there is no tower around. Why can't phones be used as walkie-talkies?

Because the person you want to contact is unlikely to be within radio distance.

yes, but how cool would that be?

I think it would be pretty cool too. For those times when you are out of range of a tower and in range of each other, you could chat up your pals out at the campsite or whathaveyou.

And if you and your ilk load some kind of meshing or 'router app' on these advanced (non-hobbled) handheld radios, you might have a better chance of getting in touch with that out of range person by routing packets across radios until you're at the internet. Even if you limit the bandwidth to text messages for this feature, it could be a real lifesaver for folks needing to get emergency messages out.

What about the push to talk feature on some work phones?

You're effectively talking about APRS[1].

[1] http://www.aprs.org

Thanks, it's fun to read through these links!

I understand they can: http://www.servalproject.org/

Thanks for the link!

What would be really cool would be a protocol to use each other's phones as data relays.

It would be cool technologically, but there’s no way in hell I’d let random strangers use my phone as a relay. No telling what some of them would be up to or downloading.

If there were a way to whitelist authenticated phones of my friends, that could work.

Hm, good point. I'm sure there'd be a business model that could get around that, but everything I'm thinking of would require people selling the system to their friends.

Normal walkie talkies have much higher powers and/or different frequencies.

Most cell phones already have Wifi, we would need a mesh (or at least special ad-hoc) standard for this and there you have your walkie talkie functionality with a bit of software.

There has been little success pushing one of those as apparently nobody cares about this feature.

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