"In 2016, in response to an ARRL petition for rulemaking, the FCC proposed to remove the symbol rate limitations, which it tentatively concluded had become unnecessary due to advances in modulation techniques and no longer served a useful purpose. That proceeding, WT Docket 16-239, is still pending."
Imagine if more services worked like a library rather than the DMV (granted libraries I guess check your address?). Imagine if going to a hospital involved checking your symptoms and not having to negotiate down prices. Imagine everyone having a ~0 cost bank account at the post office. Imagine having any form of recourse beyond posting to a forum thread for an administrative issue.
And you do know that DMVs are miserable because they don't have the budget to be properly staffed right? The pain is self-inflicted. We could give money to governments without profit motives, or we can give money to corporations with profit motives. If it's a service that we actually want in society, the answer seems obvious to me.
Commercial: We run the service for our own profit, so we do all we can for the service to be attractive: fast, easy, affordable enough but not too cheap. We'll walk an extra mile to serve a customer because it will attract more. In a pinch, we might consider using a dark pattern, but we're wary of the potential bad press.
Socialized governmental: We run our service because the state has hired us for that. Some of us see it as a noble way tp serve the public, but most of us are here for the stable salary, benefits, future pension, and a regulated workplace. We're not earning nearly as much as the commercial folks (or we are unionized and earn something closer to the commercial folks). We work by instruction, and instructions explicitly lack any extra mile provisions. We have no need to work faster, or harder, or otherwise do more work when we can do less work without breaking the instructions. BTW if the government pays us too little, we won't hesitate to go on strike; the service will cease temporarily; sorry guys.
Everything you listed could apply in both directions (you think companies don't have incentives to push down worker wages to poverty wages? You think that motivates workers to actually provide good service?) And no, companies (especially larger ones) aren't sitting around thinking about how to make products cheaper for the end user. They're thinking about how to increase their own profits! No capitalist is like "wow I really wish I could offer this at cost".
Incentive structures exist in all places, this is why you can have things like public support for teacher's strikes, tax increases, etc. Because people actually think about this stuff holistically and don't just rely on trite platitudes that they heard from their local libertarian and projecting their own selfishness on everyone else.
The top brass, though, have distinctly different incentives, and this influences how they motivate line workers, and how they structure the service.
BTW large incumbent corporations suffer often from the same disease, because, like with the government, their clients have no effective choice anyway, no need to woo them.
With teachers it's a bit special: just making the conscious effort to become a teacher is a rather strong filter. Similar with librarians, for instance. This is not the same for most governmental clerical services.
Having terrible service at the DMV is a funding decision, not a necessity, and there's absolutely no guarantee that 'private' actors will be any better.
"At all times, transmitter power must be the minimum necessary to carry out the desired communications."
"spread spectrum" - See above, plus raising the noise floor means the death of entire weak signal modes.
"encryption" - Absolutely no need. Would be death of ham radio. Why bother with cheap ham radio licenses if you can just transmit anything you want but encrypted.
"the bands are mostly empty" Buy a better antenna LOL.
Bandwidth negotiation - you can already interfere in the same way without it. This is also true of any radio communication, ELF or EHF
Spread spectrum - yes but has the ability to not significantly interfere with any single other link, can obviously otherwise be kept out of the tiny segment for weak digital or otherwise confined to sub bands
Encryption - this one's my favorite: the hardware is already common, if this argument were true then ham would already be dead. If someone is being abusive they don't give their call anyway and we hunt them with DF the way we always have.
Bands - have you seen 17m to light?
Tldr we have coexisted by being neighborly for over 100 years. New technologies won't add or remove the underlying need for being neighborly. We can therefore play with the new toys if we continue to uphold those principles as we always have.
Spread spectrum - The coding gain from SS varies with the bandwidth spread across, so SS over a narrow enough channel... isn't even SS anymore. That said we seem to agree that VHF and up there's plenty of space to channelize and regulate by frequency. What does anyone gain from it other than it interferes with anything else in its channel?
Encryption - You haven't explained why its needed. "I can't talk to you, you can't talk to me" isn't very neighborly or ham radio friendly. So its not needed and only provides downsides. Emcom is difficult enough without everyone not sharing secret keys. What part 97.1 "basis and purpose" section does secretive private transmissions benefit? I mean, if it was useful for some ham radio purpose, sure sounds cool go for it. Encryption is certainly very useful for non-ham-radio purposes, but then by definition it shouldn't be on the ham bands anyway. I admit there are weird exceptions where encryption might be useful, which are already written into regulation, like 97.211 "Space telecommand station" part (b) permits space satellite control uplinks to be encrypted, but only the control signals, which makes sense, so some rando doesn't take over a satellite...
"New technologies won't add or remove the underlying need for being neighborly."
Agreed. As of 2021 nobody has invented a technology for wideband digital to coexist with, well, anything, other than regulating under a channelized system, which seems impossible for international HF.
Your three main arguments seem to boil down to "why can't I jam other people?" whereas my point of view is "why would anyone want to jam other people" so we're probably never going to get along.
i ask because maybe there are some learnings and lessons there that could apply to internet policy today.
it sounds like certain things, like anonymity, are banned? there's some sort of community policing? i'm super curious.
The radio spectrum is a scarce resource. Two of the main reasons amateur radio users are given access to the spectrum is to help with disaster recovery and to advance the art and science of radio.
Callsigns are public - you can look up anyone's to see who they are.
You're required to give your callsign at the end of your transmission, and every 10 minutes.
There are some limitations on content. No music, no profanity, no commercial uses, and no encryption.
netiquette varies based on what you are doing. In general, shorter range bands have better sound quality and are more casual. Longer range has worse sound quality (or no sound like morse or ft8).
If you're on one of the shorter range bands (e.g. 70cm) you'll often find people who are keeping in touch with friends, or just looking for someone to talk to.
On the longer range, you'll run into stuff like contests - all the other person wants to know is who you are, and where you are. They're trying to see either how many contacts they can make in a period of time or how far away they're able to make contacts.
There are "formal traffic" nets - which pass messages. Local nets will route traffic they can't deliver to regional nets, and then back down to local nets. Usually they just pass practice traffic around - until a disaster occurs and they are needed. More info https://www.arrl.org/nts-manual
The lowest level license is the Technician. You can find the Technician exam pool online in several formats. https://www.arrl.org/files/file/VEs/2018-2022%20Tech%20Class...
Edit: I forgot about you abuse question. Hams tend to police their own or will work with the FCC to report people misusing the airwaves. The practice version of this is called "fox hunting" - where someone places a transmitter and you try to find it.
Most hams care about keeping the hobby alive. If they find someone who's broadcasting with too much power or without a license usually they'll try to work with that person to correct the behavior. If that doesn't work, they'll often work with the FCC.
Another part is "let people do their thing". Like if someone's in a special activity and managing a pileup (lots of people trying to call), just give them the exchange and move on.
Due to the asymmetric nature of propagation, stuff happens. You may not hear anyone using the frequency but they hear you just fine. If band conditions take a turn for the worse, politely tell the other person you're losing them and thanks for the conversation.
Anonymity is banned; FCC part 97 says you have to use your call sign every 10 minutes and at the end of the transmission.
Ultimately the FCC is responsible for enforcing these but of course don't have the time. People can report people to the FCC and they _may_ open an investigation depending on that nature of it. There's also the ARRL volunteer monitoring program where participants listen on the air and, through the program, send out notices of good and bad behavior, optionally referring cases to the FCC. It's usually stuff like "guy constantly being a jackass on a repeater and ruining it for others", with a good bit of "sending outside your privileges" and "not identifying yourself".
That said we've all accidentally sent outside our privileges, we've all stepped on people. It happens.
As amateurs we know that if we don't do a good job of operating we'll lose the spectrum, so it's usually not a huge problem. There are jerks, there are also people that don't know they're being jerks.
As for community policing the FCC itself polices some, and the official observer program has been replaced by the volunteer monitor program which is mostly the same thing.
I think you can assume much like on the net, there's at least ten times as many lurkers listening as there are people talking.
Back in '28, 1928, the radio amateur's code was written which was a pretty good attempt at letting people talk as much as possible while eliminating ore reducing flame wars over the air.
https://www.arrl.org/amateur-code
This mentions the informal, sometimes ignored, ban on political speech:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_amateur_radio
My guess is over the last century the more authoritarian govts banned it, and the free-er countries have lots of people who like to collect contacts and you're not going to get a collectible QSL card in the mail from a guy if over the air you call him a filthy (insert appropriate political slur here) so naturally people tended to not talk about politics, because gotta collect QSL cards or contest points or whatever.
On the radio, the quality of your station and antenna and your skills determine how many people you can talk to, so competition, so people are more civil to each other. On the internet, unfortunately everyone "hears" everyone, so there's no gain from not being a jerk, so there's lots of jerks.
There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too.
The broader problem is that prohibiting new technologies in ham radio until they've been demonstrated to be useful (in your case, demonstrated to be useful in ham radio, despite being prohibited at the time, but most people are less blatantly unreasonable) is a recipe for, at best, chasing the taillights of commercial radio systems, and more commonly total technological stagnation and gradual abandonment.
I can't even imagine what would require encryption ... maybe PII medical traffic under some peculiar artificial scenario and most pessimistic possible HIPPA interpretation?
Now remember, that the stereotype of ham radio emcom is people roll up with no idea how to program their HT to the correct frequencies so they can't even participate. So demanding everyone participate in a GPG WoT or join a Kerberos domain to share encryption keys is an absolute non-starter. If the general public cannot participate without extensive preparation before the event, it means its not part 97 emcom, its just a poor low budget imitation of part 90, its not part 97 operation at all. Why not get GMRS licenses?
Remember there is the perpetual battle in emcom between the people who think "provide emergency communications" applies to Big Brother despite his infinite budget outclassing any possible Ham response, vs the people who think emergency communications is for the people or the general public or even for the individual. Both sides like to denigrate the other side, unfortunately.
So consider I was listening to a rando ham "involuntary storm chaser" report a tornado sighting to the NWS a couple weeks ago. How, in that scenario does encryption help? By making it impossible for the ham to talk to the NWS station because they never shared keys in advance or they shared the 2020 keys and not the 2021 keys? By making it impossible for the general public to hear the tornado report they would be safer not knowing?
Consider something topical, like the hurricane in NO. A rando member of the general ham radio public reports hurricane related flooding. The value encryption provides is making it impossible for the ham radio operator to talk to people to make the report, and encryption also makes it impossible for the general ham radio public to help. "Real ham radio emcom" situation he'd just dial up the repeater and talk to net control and make his report and move on with life. Somehow encryption would help, but ... how?
Edited to add:
> There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too.
I forgot to agree with you on that. Repeater control links and the like.
But I think the vast bulk of communications necessary in an emergency is between people who need to talk to their family members to find out where they are, what condition they're in, and what resources they have. That information often needs to remain private between the people who are communicating. Right now it's not mostly sent over ham radio because it can't be. In fact, it isn't transmitted at all, so people die. Advances like Codec 2 dramatically expand our possibilities for communications in emergencies, but mostly for doing new things like that, things we're not already doing.
As another example, suppose that, instead of one person reporting hurricane-related flooding you had a water-level sensor every 100 meters in a rough hexagonal grid, each transmitting a packet every 6 minutes carrying a 16-bit ID and an 8-bit water level. In theory this is an average of about 8 bits per second per square kilometer, so it wouldn't have to cause much interference or use much average power, but it's hard to get it to work under Part 15 rules because Part 15 doesn't allow you to average your power usage over 6 minutes, so you pretty much have to build a mesh network to get adequate range at the allowed power levels. You probably need to cryptographically sign the packets for the system to be reasonably reliable. (They don't need to be secret, but you need to be able to distinguish legitimate reports from griefers trying to divert emergency resources when there's no emergency.)
Nowadays you might be able to do that with LoRa. But you could have done it 20 years ago on the amateur bands --- except that it's illegal. So again hams are chasing the taillights of commercial radio, the opposite of how it's supposed to be.
Airplanes are controlled by in the clear, unsigned radio comms every day. I don’t see why emergency comms over AR is a more compelling case for a secure link.
"Katie and Uncles Bob and Jim are all moving from X to Y. We're armed only with our AR-15s and have plenty of ammo. We had to leave behind a few other things at the house, but we're moving safely and expected at Y before dark."
If the family knows they don't own any AR-15s and don't have any uncles named Bob or Jim, the message is received (or enough of it to be practically useful without being an unneeded forfeiture of OpSec).
Some research - paramedics are likely covered under HIPAA (if they work for a healthcare entity that provides ambulance services), I don't believe police or the fire department would be covered.
After Katrina, dead bodies with gunshot wounds rotted in the streets for weeks, uninvestigated. Human jackals aren't common but when they sense impunity they do make their presence known.
So really this kind of rendezvous arrangement benefits enormously from being able to discuss such plans at some length, but it would be terrible if random strangers were listening in. Without cellphones, you have to discuss this stuff in advance in order to successfully meet up with people; you can't pop off an SMS to ask them where they are or let them know you're running late.
ISM short range device (SRD) - the rules are very simple: transmit anything you want, no more than xxx watts, tx duty cycle no more than 1%. IMHO, this can be scaled to ham frequencies (ex: 0.01% duty cycle).
ISM 2.4 GHz - the rules are (basically) transmit only if no other signal is detected above threshold (-75dBm). Exponential back off otherwise. This is also called the Aloha model. This model also works most of the time, although its applicability to HF propagation is unclear.
The history of HF packet radio going back almost 40 years now, shows it stomps things pretty bad. RTTY and PSK31 ops simply cannot operate nearby HF packet channels.
Aloha DOES work really well for decades on "toll quality VHF FM" strong high SNR local packet radio LANs.
Everyone's gotta be able to hear everyone or else channel thruput drops to about zero. Easy on a city wide VHF FM packet lan, impossible on HF.
Reminds me of thin net ethernet in the 80s (thicknet also, LOL). One babbling transmitter and the whole LAN is down for everyone.
The ham bands are for experimentation. Currently experimentation is essentially banned as the most of the biggest recent innovations are against the rules and the old guard wants to ban the rest (see FT8/WSPR).
Negotiation - there are plenty of bandwidth negotiation strategies, not just scream louder. You can listen and avoid areas where people are obviously talking, it doesn't take human level intellect to detect signal.
SS - interference avoidance is the biggest use case. There are a number of different techniques here, not just noise vomit, chirp being one of the more interesting.
Encryption - Obviously nobody in their right mind is going to sit there and scream about a tornado on an encrypted channel or try to coordinate encrypted emcom. Simplifying ham to the point where anyone can use it is called the FRS band and as such we don't need to worry about that here. There are plenty of useful cases though, remote command/telemetry being only one of many. Experimenting with encrypted modes/algorithms/hardware is the most relevant, as well as just wanting the ability to have a private conversation from time to time. Lets also not forget that it's legal in Europe and they have yet to meet a firey ham demise.
2021 - and with these rules there never will be one. Private industry has no interest but spectrum is finite and human needs are infinite. Developing such a mode would be extremely useful if the FCC ever gets around to increasing the size and number of ISM bands as more applications arise.
I'd be willing to meet you with this: the HF bands are touchy, I fully agree there's a legitimate interest in keeping things the way they are >=20m. I think the wild west should really open up at VHF and above however. There just isn't any use save one repeater out of hundreds every few hours in a sea of blue waterfall. Even if encryption/SS/WB/whatever was legalized on 2m/70cm and WILDLY abused (it wouldn't be) I don't think anyone would really even notice.
As it stands, there are enough digital modes that one could reasonably operate with encrypted business band radios and nobody would know as one has to assume that any mode they can't receive is yet another one they don't have a radio for yet there isn't widespread abuse. Similarly there are countries where it's legal and it's not a problem.
The advantage of business band isn't the encryption, it's being able to have a guaranteed frequency to yourself. On the ham bands you'd have to train all your users how hop around if someone started using the frequency.
The world of HF is very different from higher bands because of propagation and low band width (especially for hams). With a well tuned antenna even a relatively modest transmitter can DX hundreds or thousands of miles.
* The low band width on HF with a high noise floor makes high symbol rates pointless throughout the band. You'd need so much FEC there'd be little benefit from the higher rates. A symbol rate that might work fine for contacts a hundred miles apart will just be noise for contacts five hundred miles away. Because of DXing on HF it's entirely possible to have your transmissions picked up across the hemisphere.
* Likewise symbol rate negotiation is problematic because of propagation. Transmissions aren't point to point links even if you're addressing a particular station. Like the point above symbol rates that work for two stations will not necessarily work for all stations that will receive the signal. That's just more noise for them and an inability to use that part of the band.
* The band width for hams on HF is too small for spread spectrum comms to be useful. Yet again transmissions that work in some conditions won't necessarily work everywhere the transmission reaches.
* Quick, what's the difference between an encrypted signal with a long duty cycle and noise? NOTHING. Every aspect of ham radio comes back down to being good stewards of a scarce resource and sharing it.
If you blast your headphones you're not going to affect me living next door. You can listen to whatever you want at any volume. If you blow out your ear drums that's your business. If you instead blast your big-ass stereo speakers now you're affecting me next door. You've got a right to blast out your eardrums, not mine.
Radio, like the air between our houses, is a shared medium. There's bands where if you want to blast signals or play around with different modes, I'll never detect it even living next door. There's also bands, like HF, where you can affect my use of the band even on opposite sides of the state. You don't have more of a right to hams bands than I do. If you want to blast high powered wide bandwidth transmissions, petition the FCC to buy a license to some spectrum (good luck).
The issue isn't graybeard hams being afraid of new fangled technology. While those do exist the much bigger issue is the whole of the HF band (and all uses of it) could fit in a single WiFi channel with room to spare. Of that tiny space hams have privileges on a tiny subsection. To even use that tiny subsection requires advanced licensing and a fair investment in equipment. Any individual user wants to put that time/money investment to use but so does every other user. It's hard to share a sliver of bandwidth if there's a couple assholes essentially blasting out noise all across that sliver of spectrum.
As for your suggestions for things in the HF bands, they simply do not make sense for the reasons I described. In the blasting stereo analogy, HF is like a stereo blasting you can hear across the country. There's very little bandwidth to even negotiate between stations and conditions vary so much that you'd need to change the symbol rate constantly. Hams settled on CW and slow digital modes on HF because that's what tends to works best on HF. They don't need wide bandwidth and they resist multipath interference.
I think you seriously mis-understand how much the "crusty old hams" know, and do, in the modern Internet: They helped build it. Not only the SL/IP and AX25 part, a lot more than just that.
Read up on KA9Q. Top hit in wikipedia is good. Now, look at the person. The wikipedia link is good. Now, go look at the company he works at, or used to. Now, open your cellphone, and look at the logo on the chipsets...
They seem to have literally said that. The new higher baud protocols cannot use more spectrum that the 300 baud version they approved.