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Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

Ham radio can't be used for commercial purposes nor can it carry encrypted content. Operators also have to be licensed which means all of their personal details are on file with the licensing government. If they're caught breaking the bounds of their license it will be revoked and they can personally face fines and even criminal charges.

Even if you got a bunch of hams to illegally carry general purpose Internet content the ham bands aren't exactly brimming with available bandwidth. Most packet radio below 30MHz (where you'll get your long range transmissions) is commonly 300bps. That's bits per second. Instead of risking hams go buy some cantennas and set up a WiFi mesh.

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> Ham radio can't be used for commercial purposes nor can it carry encrypted content. Operators also have to be licensed which means all of their personal details are on file with the licensing government. If they're caught breaking the bounds of their license it will be revoked and they can personally face fines and even criminal charges.

I know that, it's what I was referring to when I was talking about the ability to use HAM radio. It's trivially easy to relay packets over HAM bands right now, given a transciever; the biggest thing preventing fairly wide-spread use is the legality.

> the ham bands aren't exactly brimming with available bandwidth

Even slow dialup speeds would be nice. I'm thinking of more-or-less direct internet connections between e.g. the US, Europe and Russia, or even just over a few hundred miles. Doesn't have to be fast; the ability to send anything at all over that distance in a direct connection would be an improvement. A wifi mesh can't do that.

Lay off the ham stuff. It's not and will never happen. Anything you suggest is just pirate transmissions so go suggest a totally illegal pirate wireless network with no power limits or band plan.

Eh, it might. Would probably rejuvinate the field. There's a lot of advances in digital signal processing that could be applied to those bands. The limitation on encryption would have to be lifted first, and maybe the commercial limitation you mentioned, but that's likely the only thing that would have to be fixed. Overpowered transmissions aren't needed.

I don't get why you think I'm suggesting pirate transmissions.

I think GP is saying that there would be a sea change IFF

1. there was legal unlicensed radio bandwidth for any radio services that had cognitive radio capabilities (constant frequency hopping, coordinating frequencies with other nodes after negotiating what frequencies, ensuring the radio bandwidth used is only using whitespace or can be empirically proven to not interfere with other radio transmissions)

2. HAM radio bands aren't touched. Some HAMers are grumpy enough about radio licensing dogma / vigilante radio spectrum law enforcement duty, no need to kick the hornets nest of telling them that not only are radio licensing rules changing from the paradigm introduced in the 30s (see point 1) but that it would remove some of their own dwindling radio bands as well.

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