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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

It's not just that.. The thing is also that if everyone starts using encryption the community is gone.

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.

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I think I addressed your second point above; for the first one, I think the ham community is largely gone at this point.

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".

> 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.

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.

Here are the question IDs from the 2019-2023 general and 2020-2024 extra pools.

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

Vacuum tube amplifiers are still current technology for the high power folks, especially home builders.

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

Analog slow-scan TV is cool as hell. I got a freakin' image transmitted to me by the international space station?! Nothing "old-timer" about that at all, and was one of the most interesting things I found as a newcomer to amateur radio :)

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