Every single person here uses high powered encrypted communication without a license, it's a cell phone.
My experience in the amateur radio community is that hate is exceedingly rare, although disagreement is common.
> Every single person here uses high powered encrypted communication without a license, it's a cell phone.
So let's have a discussion: do we really want these kickass bands to become another cell phone band? I think it's useful to have a part of the spectrum on which deafening corporate rent-seeking cannot hide.
I work full-time on cryptology, so I'm no stranger to the benefits of developing network protocols with cryptographic primitives in mind.
However, the radio spectrum is a great place to let many flowers bloom, and the amatuer bands appear to be experiencing a lovely, overdue bloom right now.
I bought an Icom-7100 last year, and the rapid growth of linux support for hacking on low-signal modes is wonderful to see, and I think it's happening because this band is the way that it is.
> FCC regulation of ham radio is at best antiquated cold war bullshit
Listen: I'm all for completely abolishing the FCC. However, I also recognize that the amateur radio licensing program plays a very important role in society: it allows us to stand and be counted in favor of tinkering and experimentation in the mainstream of some of the best bands on the spectrum. It prevents the government and its cronies from claiming that these bands are fallow and better utilized as even more centralized, profiteering, plastic bullshit.
I don't disagree with your thinking, I just ask that we apply different thinking to different parts of the spectrum so that we can have a more robust and diverse experimental reckoning of the airwaves with which we're blessed.
It's like asking why a car driver needs to understand when to turn off high-beams, when not to honk, and how to safely open their door after parking on a busy street.
i.e. we live in a society, other people are affected by your actions.
Your cell service provider holds the license.
Ham radio exam is not hard, and does not require special training, just some basic knowledge of how radios work and what the regulations are. I don't see what the issue is.
Not only that, but every exam question comes from a published pool of questions [0]. If you can memorize the answers to those questions, then you don’t need to learn anything about how radio works at all.
There's a lot of fundamental infrastructure decentralization that can happen once some of the HAM frequencies allow encrypted use.
What you really want instead is something like the HAM license allowing the use of point to point equipment at higher power and on frequencies reserved for operators that respect the communications medium.
I find it more believable that the government is scared of such technology than that encryption would be such a detriment to the HAM radio community.
That's the problem - hn regularly has threads talking about how decentralized infrastructure is so important. Having a (dialup speed) p2p network that is built on long range connections would be insanely reliable and would probably revolutionize what we think of as the Internet.
- ISPs would be optional
- access to the internet would be the one-time cost of the hardware
- a totalitarian government trying to shutdown the internet would have to hunt down portable repeaters over hundreds of square miles
- the infrastructure would be in the hands of the people, not megacorps like verizon and comcast.
But that requires encryption, and spectrum allocations that can cover the distance.
1: For stupid legacy reasons, I can't use crypto
2: In order to get and hold a license, I have to provide my full name and address, which is then PUBLICLY AVAILABLE
No, I don't care about ham, I care about the many other things you need a ham license for, such as flying drones in some configurations. I never said any of this was an accident, and the cryto stuff is absolutely cold war legacy bs.
If your signal is strong enough to interfere with common uses of the band, well, then that's why people care.