No, we aren't and we like it the way it is.
The last thing ham radio needs is corporations just taking our bands, or ham radio getting banned in unstable countries over espionage concerns.
If you want encryption, use a cellphone, LoRaWAN etc.
The last thing ham radio needs is corporations just taking our bands, or ham radio getting banned in unstable countries over espionage concerns.
If you want encryption, use a cellphone, LoRaWAN etc.
Yes, encryption would make some enforcement actions slightly harder, but we tolerate it in plenty of other settings where you have a constrained, shared resource. Wifi comes to mind. Nobody gets upset that you can't examine your neighbors' packets to make sure they're following the law or not using the spectrum for a purpose other than "bona fide" home wifi. Even though the wifi spectrum in urban areas is far more crowded than ham frequencies.
For much of the hobby's history, the government was deeply distrustful of amateur radio. They flat out banned all operations during WWI and WWII. And a lot of ham radio folks reminisce about the good old times when the government had listening stations and amateur radio enforcement operations throughout the country, and would knock on the doors of any amateurs who did anything wrong. Well, they funded that not because they shared your passion, but because they wanted to keep Soviet spies at bay.
The ban on encryption was supposed to serve the government's interests, nothing more. If you worry about corporations misusing the spectrum, it's sufficient to require identification in plain text; if somebody is using amateur callsigns but sending 9-to-5 chatter on a fixed frequency every day, and you pinpoint it to a local warehouse, that's more enough for enforcement action, right? Except... there is almost no enforcement these days, because the Cold War is over and the government lost all interest.
Ham radio getting "banned in unstable countries" seems like a whimsical concern, too. First, many other countries do not restrict encryption the way US does. Secondly, in the era of the Internet, mesh networking, ubiquitous smartphones, etc, ham radio hardly registers on the radar for most governments. Maybe in North Korea... so let's ban encryption domestically, including in the short-distance VHF/UHF band, to stay on Kim's good side?
Right now at night we turn on the radios and check the local repeaters for activity and whatnot. Hear some interesting QSOs. If everyone is chatting encrypted this won't work.
It also would enable people to use it as a free alternative for a commercial license - after all when it's encrypted we can't check that it's not used for such a purpose anymore. Using locations as you suggest isn't enough as it will need really targeted surveillance. Also, for a warehouse any of the free radio modes are more than sufficient in range.
The ban on encryption isn't really much to do with espionage. Spies don't need a license.
As you note, there are something like 700,000 licensed people in the US, but if you tune in to your local repeater and listen for a month, you will hear the same 2-8 people, typically in their 70s - and that's about it. They're there due to force of habit, and when they die, they're not going to be replaced. The same demographics can be observed for most ham clubs, maybe outside the SF Bay Area (where the median age is closer to 50).
So what are we really protecting here - a "community" representing and speaking on behalf of maybe 0.1% of all licensed individuals? Is this something to treasure, or should we bite the bullet and instead encourage a larger group of people to build something new?
And I hate to say this, but I think this situation is of their own doing. The old-timers wanted all the newcomers to follow in their footsteps and get excited in exactly the same things. As evidenced in the community-developed ham exam, which deals with such exciting and timely topics as tuning vacuum tube amplifiers, receiving analog slow-scan TV signals, memorizing Morse code shorthands, and DX contests that lost most of their "oomph" when the Internet showed up.
Meanwhile, VFH / UHF handheld-to-handheld messaging is still an elusive technology, and many old-timers don't consider anything above HF to be "real ham".
That's a lot of text to just tell everyone you made up a bunch of shit. None of that shit is on licensing exams. What is on the exams are things demonstrating you've got enough knowledge to not electrocute yourself, not get RF burns, not turn your radio into a jamming device, and understand the etiquette for sharing very limited bandwidth available to amateurs.
Vacuum tube amplifier tuning: E7B09, https://hamstudy.org/browse/E4_2016/E7B
Analog slow scan television signal components: E2B10, https://hamstudy.org/browse/E4_2020/E2B
Morse code shorthands: G2C02, https://hamstudy.org/browse/E3_2015/G2C
Some morse shorthand is useful. CQ for instance. QRM, QSO and many more are all used for voice as well.
However, I will not defend the old guard too far. I get tired of the right-wing boomer conversations pretty quickly. Everything was better in the past....blah blah
I continue to be amazed at what I consider to be a very unexpected cultural intersection:
Technical, do it yourself, nearly exclusively male, out-hacking one another with radio bits ... but simultaneously vehemently defensive of, and slavishly adherent to, arbitrary government regulations that strictly limit what they can do with their hobby.
The deference to arbitrary authority in the HAM community is really jarring ...
Everyone with some sort of radio license from commercial broadcasters to amateurs have some sort of legal limits on their operation. Radio is a shared medium and being an asshole can ruin the medium for other uses over a huge area.
When it comes to encryption, good encryption is little different from noise. I also have no idea what you're doing on the band. Do you just have a mistuned radio? Are you overdriving your transmitter? What I do know is you're raising the noise floor on whatever band you're on and keeping me from using it.
Your WiFi being encrypted is a much different situation. Best case propagation is hundreds of feet and the PEP is so low that beyond a relatively short distance your transmissions literally blend into background noise for me. So your WiFi doesn't affect me too badly unless we're in adjacent apartments and you've got your output power maxed out.
Your encrypted transmissions on the rarified space available for hams ruins it for a lot of users over a wide area. That is why hams are fine with no encryption for amateur operation.
You're not entirely wrong, an undocumented plaintext protocol is functionally not much different from encryption.
However, those which are legitimate (ie, just undocumented, not intentionally encrypted/obfuscated) don't tend to cause problems as only one or few ham devs would be using them. They can only get widespread adoption by other hams if they are documented. So this regulates itself.
A corporation, on the other hand, is not like some ham dev coming up with their own protocol. They can design their own protocol, and then roll it out on thousands (or much more) of transmitters. So just one corporation can cause quite a big problem, with zero public documentation.
The laws as they are, together with direction finding skills, are the communities only (legal) tool to defend against that.
That does not mean hams don't see the value in encryption. I do! But it's a trade-off, and I think this is the only way it can work. The legal change I would like to see is explicitly allowing cryptographic signatures. Right now it's a grey area (likely legal, but not court tested)
> They can only get widespread adoption by other hams if they are documented.
> So this regulates itself
Until the first project gets traction that allows you to easily drop in public/private key encryption of payload.
There are already protocols that are widely used in ham radio that support encryption. For example, DMR supports encryption (because DMR can also operate in commercial bands, under different laws), it's just not used for ham radio and I've never seen a ham turn it on. Wifi supports encryption, and ham radio operators using it in ham radio bands (with more power) actually turn encryption on but document the PSK publicly (in an attempt to keep the non hams out, but make the encryption more an encoding that anyone could decode).
In my experience, ham radio operators generally roughly follow the rules.
You could incorporate cryptographic signatures, diffie-helmann key exchanges, all kinds of fun stuff, and so long as you periodically transmit the decryption key, you're not hiding anything. I'm not sure what the legality of this is.