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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Amateur Radio has a chance to become massively popular through a resurgence of interest in mesh networking but unfortunately laws are not evolving fast enough for this to become possible. Right now it's illegal to transmit encrypted data over the air [0] which basically kills everything like. The areas where people are becoming increasingly active in radio are things like NYC Mesh which can only utilize a very small segment of the bands (and not even the ones hams use!) for running their networks.

I'd love for an IP over Mesh network to become popular. Doing IRC and reinventing a lot of the early internet in a distributed manor would be very fun.

[0] - Unless it is for the control of a satellite.

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But then it's no longer Amateur Radio, it'll just be another unlicensed spectrum like the Wifi spectrum since there's no way to know who is using it or what data is going over it.

There may be value for this to the public, but it's not the same as Amateur Radio.

It can be if it's not available for commercial use. The WiFi spectrum is for commercial use. The ham spectrums could still require a license and could only be used for hobbyists. We'd need a way to verify who the sender is via unencrypted comms, but the rest could be encrypted. Maybe a standard header every 5 mins.

How do you know whether Joe Blow H6F5KY is sending out personal messages to his wife from work, or broadcasting orders to his fleet of delivery drivers?

Ah. So it's not amateur unless it's policed!

I'm pretty sure you were being snarky, but you're exactly right, otherwise it'll just become a commercial network.

A "no commercial traffic but there's no way anyone could verify it" rule wouldn't be very effective.

At low scale it's not a problem and at large scale it can't be hidden.

What would the nightmare scenario look like? Drama? The community gits gud at MIMO, to work around the abuse, and HFDF, to track it down and police it? I'd watch that movie. Hell, I'd play that game, sign me up!

If all else fails, what about new legislation involving cryptographic signatures and bandwidth quotas? What if those spawn a secondary market where people take the HAM test just to rent out their callsign for crypto tokens? Would that be a bad thing or spawn a crazy collectively-owned disintermediation of telcos? Would the world really be such a bad place if instead of paying $60 to ATT I could pay $30 to some teenagers who memorized RF facts long enough to pass a test?

I'd say that HAM can evolve or it can die -- but eventually the people holding it back will literally die and then it will evolve all the same. That's how actual evolution works. You can't stop the future. Still, you can hold it back, and it's unfortunate to see that happening, from a community of techies no less.

>I'd say that HAM can evolve or it can die -- but eventually the people holding it back will literally die and then it will evolve all the same. That's how actual evolution works. You can't stop the future. Still, you can hold it back, and it's unfortunate to see that happening, from a community of techies no less.

Pretty much sums it up. Locally the people who are in charge of the clubs which ultimately advised the government were in their 50s to 90s (yes that's a 9). The people doing anything more interesting than talking on on those channels are all under 40.

Ham radio is meant for experimentation, not (just) talking to your friends. These people remind me of Bell in the 70s forbidding you from connecting anything that's not a phone to the telephone network.

What about LoRa? Doesn’t that exist precisely to scratch these itches, without impacting traditional HF QRP etc.?

Different bands have different physical properties.

One of the points of amateur radio is experimentation. Right now the old boys clubs that all ham radio organizations have turned into to have decided that packet networking isn't real ham radio and you shouldn't be able to do it on "their" spectrum.

Apart from talking to satellites, packets and encryption are fine there for some reason.

The UK band plans seem pretty progressive, explicitly allocating spectrum for digital modes, though it is admittedly still the poor relation to rag chewing:

https://rsgb.services/public/bandplans/html/rsgb_band_plan_2...

(If you’re not familiar with the UK structure, OfCom is the FCC-like government regulator, while RSGB is the de facto ruling body / club-of-clubs run by amateurs for amateurs.)

SELF-policed.

That’s fundamentally what’s at question here: is amateur radio literally just non-professionals toying with RF, or is it some collection of rituals like HF ragchewing and SKCC? It seems that the ARRL has decided it’s the latter while everyone under 40 years old has decided it’s the former.

As a general class operator under 40 I wish it was the latter.

Marconi and the other greats in the history of radio were people messing around in an unregulatedish space. The only place you find those kinds of hams anymore is in THz operators who do some crazy shit.

Don't encrypt. Problem solved?

Orders received. The cake is in the oven.

Exactly, amateur radio needs to be bandwidth for testing and experimentation not building out long term projects on it - basically just assume someone else is going start using the same frequencies.

Also, my understanding is that the encryption rule isn't really enforced but still prevents mass abuse. Plus if the entire stream is encrypted then you can always claim to be transmitting random data as a public good for random number generation.

>But then it's no longer Amateur Radio,

Take your binary message, encrypt it, use a lookup table to encode the bits into common English words, send them in the clear.

>No sir, this is just a random word service which provides random words free on the air.

Usually when you come up with an obvious solution around a problem that no one else has thought of, it's because it's not a solution.

The actual rule would prohibit this since it prohibits: messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning

And I think a "random word service" would also violate: nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules

>illegal to transmit encrypted data over the air

This restriction comes up quite a lot in discussions about "modernizing" ham radio. I predict that if encryption was universally allowed, the ham bands would quickly become saturated with encrypted channels as hobbyists and not-hobbyists start using the bands for their personal communications networks.

The two main problems with allowing encryption are that 1. The HF bands often have worldwide propagation with very low power levels, which turns local interference into national or international interference, and 2. With encrypted communications it would be impossible to enforce other amateur radio laws, such as forbidding commercial uses.

I think that allowing encryption on dedicated slices of the UHF bands would be a more realistic approach.

There's a difference between modernization and monetization. Commercial traffic can remain banned. License requirements remain in place. And we can have a standard way to transmit digital callsign before an encrypted packet. There are volunteers right now who do a great job of policing the use of ham bands, and FCC does actually initiate enforcement actions including 5 figure fines.

If the transmission consists of <CALLSIGN><ENCRYPTED PAYLOAD> then there is no way to determine if the payload is commercial in nature. One particular example is business owners using amateur radio spectrum for business communications. Or some wise-guy using amateur spectrum for his high frequency trading to beat the speed of copper.

can you actually beat copper?

Yes. It is a simple Google search away.

Surprisingly, yes!

Signals in copper travel at about 0.7C, while radio in air travels at ~1.0C. (Light in fibre optic cable is also about 0.7C).

Three thoughts:

1. HFT firms have definitely tried to perform HFT communication on HF bands before, see [1].

2. IIRC there have been some undecipherable transmissions in ham HF bands that were suspected to be associated with HFT, but I can't find a source right now.

3. While you don't have any additional latency from routers and serialization delays in the path across the pond, you need to keep in mind that long-range HF communications rely on bouncing the signal on the F1/F2 layers of the ionosphere (an atmospheric layer with lots of charged particles/ions that act as a mirror to HF signals). If you're comparing HF transmission with a hypothetical straight-line fiber connection (assuming it the propagation speed in the fiber is comparable to the atmospheric propagation speed [2]), the fiber connection would win.

Additionally, bandwidth is an extremely scarce resource in HF bands (compared to cellular networks or other common VHF/UHF systems). There's a reason people still use CW (morse code) or even PSK31 [3] instead of SSB (voice) [4] in HF bands: You need around 500 Hz for CW signals, around 3000 Hz for SSB signals. PSK31 only needs 31.25 Hz. My point is: While you might beat latency of fiber connections and routers along the path, the throughput is going to be quite low for HF transmission.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/wall-street-tries-shortwave-radio-...

[2] Since you mentioned copper: Copper can be quite a bit slower than fiber depending on cable type, since the propagation speed of signals in copper cables depends on the velocity factor. Wikipedia gives a few examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor

[3] PSK31 stands for Phase Shift Keying at 31 Bd. The short explanation is that PSK31 is a bandwidth-optimized text transmission mode.

[4] SSB stands for Single Sideband. The short explanation is that SSB is a bandwidth-optimized AM voice mode.

a bit more info on [1] for your there - its actually a 3 part piece. https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr...

Bloomberg picked it up as well if you are into that side of things - https://web.archive.org/web/20180625133148/https://www.bloom...

There is plenty of ISM spectrum for people to use however they like.

I think the biggest reason not to allow encrypted data is the second point you mentioned. The bands will begin being used for purposes other than what the rules of ham radio allow.

There are some individuals apart of groups who would definitely use encryption on the ham bands as a means to have communications taking place that are not allowed by the rules. The biggest one would be communications with a connection to politics. Met plenty of these types who are jealous of the ham band and scorn the rules because of that, so they keep themselves on CB and FMRS.

Also like you mentioned, it is now free radio space for commercial entities to try to use.

> illegal to transmit encrypted data over the air

While a massive restriction, you can prevent interference (but not eavesdropping!) by signing your payloads. Maybe it's because ham radio and privacy aware people is a venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but it feels like perfect being the enemy of good.

Completely different threat model. I want to send messages to my friend that are private, and it would be awesome if we could do it p2p on a mesh net that doesn't require any centralized infrastructure.

Modification of those messages isn't something I'm worried about. It's not perfectionism, it's a different use case.

Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together.

And if that's the use case you want, you should look elsewhere.... At least, that's what the people leading the ham radio community and arrl say.

I'm not sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure I disagree either. I certainly think the community aspect is less important today due to the internet, but it's probably still crucial.

> you should look elsewhere.... At least, that's what the people leading the ham radio community and arrl say.

And that's what people are doing, which is (I'd guess) why we're commenting on an article about the uncertain future of HAM radio.

Also, that's going to change the community, but it won't erase it. Just like the HN community isn't hampered by the presence of encryption.

Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.

When I flung packets across the bay with a friend, we used cell phones to figure out antenna positioning and alignment. violating the spirit of the intention of these rules, imo, but hard to say

> Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.

Makes sense. And my cohort comes from an era when we can talk to anyone, anywhere, but the channels are controlled and watched. The ability to communicate isn't special anymore, but the ability to communicate independently and privately is. We don't want communication, we want known-good (dare I say, safe?) communication channels.

> the channels are controlled and watched

Do you think that ham radio couldn't be? Or isn't? What you really want is privacy, authz/authn concerns, and decentralization, it sounds like. And TCP/IP is about as useful as a "PHY" layer for your application as is ham radio.

Plus, solutions like what you're describing require a relative ease of use - unless you only want to talk to the 17 other people in your geographical area who have similar technical backgrounds.

The difference is that the internet, at the physical level, is centralized through interconnects. In a way that radio transmission need not be.

The whole idea of long range is that my geographical area isn't a limiting factor. I'd be on a 20kbps VPN LAN with the 200 other people in the world who have similar technical backgrounds - especially if we were running this over shortwave.

And that's just the beginning, before people put in the effort to make it more accessible.

TCP/IP isn't the point, it's the encryption that lets me send encrypted, secure emails to my friends over a network that only wideband jamming or a natural disaster can take down.

Not to mention the amazing software we could build in a distributed P2P way now that we have a massive amount if research into things like CRDTs and consensus algorithms.

We could have a leaderless IRC server, leaderless peer discovery and routing, IP/DNS controlled by consensus.

Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together

My question is whether this kind of regulated openness is more worthy of the spectrum assigned to hams than some alternative scheme might be. It's certainly not a very efficient use of spectrum.

>Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together.

Maybe on paper. Where I live it seems to be about old grouchy white guys gatekeeping and LARPing that they would be of any value in a natural disaster.

Also what the federal government says.

You can still experiment with and build an encrypted mesh network, but you need different licenses to do so.

Check out LoRa.

The bandwidth is abysmal, IIRC.

Abysmal, asymmetrical and it's all proprietary.

Trying to avoid proprietary things, where possible. Especially at the protocol/application layer.

Lora and other chirp based protocols are incredibly cool, and I've been playing with them

What are the other chirp-based protocols?

This is what I came here to say. The encryption prohibition destroys the biggest use case I can see, which is long distance mesh networks. Those networks would represent a leap forward for both HAM radio and for the development of a resilient, grassroots, worldwide communication system.

There’s limited bandwidth available. I definitely think it’s worth experimenting, but my expectation would be that any bands that allow for encryption would quickly be saturated with traffic.

I imagine there might be other mechanisms for limiting abuse - e.g., limit the traffic that any given call sign can generate. The call signs can help ensure it's non-commercial. Plus, don't people like doing fox hunts?

We would learn a lot, that's for sure. I wonder if they could time box an experiment for 5 years and see what happens.

Once the Commercial users get their foot in the door, you'll never be able to close it.

People do experiment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx6cm1rNDLM

Of course, packet radio, APRS, etc have been around for decades. It's just not encrypted.

You could build out an entire POC test net without encryption, but it feels like something is missing or it would have been done already.

Lack of bandwidth / capacity to reach any meaningful speed, scale, reliability etc? Or just no demand given how effective copper / wifi / 5g is?

Or perhaps the 'hobby' really is dead and there just are not the tinkerers there once were.

> Or perhaps the 'hobby' really is dead and there just are not the tinkerers there once were.

The tinkerers are there, but encryption is a must-have. If HAM can't make that work, it's likely to die.

All this fear mongering is just setting the stage for sale of the spectrum. The hobby is still growing and has been continuously for decades.

https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/stats/index.html

It’s not growing like the Internet, but there isn’t space like the Internet. It’s fixed real estate that can only have so many people on at one time. If you cruise the HF bands in the evening there’s lots of chatter going on, there’s no room for 1000 times as many people.

Yes it could grow faster, yes it could be much much much more welcoming to new people. The industry could support it with cheaper hardware and technology that allows for more tinkering. But if we want make wholesale changes to the regulations, like allowing encryption, it’s going to have to be very well thought out.

> But if we want make wholesale changes to the regulations, like allowing encryption, it’s going to have to be very well thought out.

I'm all for working out a really good way to allow encryption. But it sure seems like the pervasive reaction to encryption is just resistance; and that makes me pessimistic.

Sure there's resistance. Imagine being a ranger that's been tending the same national park location for the past 30 years. One day some people come in from the DNR and say they are hearing complaints about no cell signal so they are going to build a road and clear out two acres of land to drop in a tower.

Sure it will help the park appeal to a broader community and drive up visibility and maybe increase overall revenue...but...ugh.

Decent analogy, but classic ham radio isn't a 'natural state' that's being encroached upon. It's just an older technology. I think a better comparison would be if the park had no cell signal, but did have an old pager network set up.

It works, but...ugh.

The pagers used to be extremely valuable...before better tech was invented. Very few people have a use for the outdated tech anymore. Cell phones let us do far more.

There is absolutely no need for encryption to get mesh working.

I think there is another agenda: There has always been political pressure to open the ham bands for commercial use. And the one thing that has kept the commercials out is being able to inspect their packets, eg the ban on encryption.

It seems that the push for encryption is a barely hidden campaign by commercial entities.

If anything, I'd guess it's closer to being the other way around. Encryption allows us to pull in about 40 years of research in packet radio and protocols that run on top of it; that plus the HAM bands is an internet that no government entity can control, or even locate geographically (without a ton of in-person effort).

I imagine that prospect is frightening to a lot of 3-letter agencies.

> There is absolutely no need for encryption to get mesh working.

The internet learned the hard way that encryption is very important, even for casual use. I'm not sending emails -- even, especially, to my friends -- that aren't encrypted.

There’s been long distance mesh networks since the 80s with packet radio. Unencrypted. Somehow they made it work then and it still works today.

> a resilient, grassroots, worldwide communication system

With the tsunamis, the impending climate collapse and social unrest this should be seen as a need rather than a hobby.

Governments allocated huge chunks of the spectrum for commercial use (and pocketed lobby money) while keeping HAM radio unusable and public use spectrum tiny.

> Right now it's illegal to transmit encrypted data over the air

I don't get it. Why would encrypted transmissions be illegal? Doesn't that make local wireless networks illegal?

Always thought that was weird. Cryptography is used all over the internet today yet it it's illegal to encrypt radio transmissions.

It's illegal to encrypt amateur radio transmissions. Other transmission modes may allow it depending on regulations for that particular use. For wifi, it's absolutely allowed.

Some legacy Cold War law I think

The main reason for this is historic, though there is probably some desire to maintain the restriction to ensure the amateur bands are used by amateurs.

While encryption itself is old, its widespread civilian use is relatively recent. There was a time when one could easily pick up receivers to listen into everything from telephone conversations (cordless and cellular), to commercial bands, to the police. Encryption was largely seen as a thing used by the military and intelligence organizations.

There were other reasons for encryption being of limited use. The cost of hardware to encrypt (and decrypt) signals was a factor. The relatively limited role of radio communications due to reliability also played a role. While most of us are only familiar with the end-user facing aspects of computers, the digital revolution played a more important role in communications. It has changed everything from how we share the spectrum to making communications more reliable. It has also opened up higher frequency bands in a cost effective manner. While enabling new applications, many of which involve more the transmission of more sensitive information, it has also made it easier to intercept communications and enabled the bulk collection of data. In other words, we view encryption as a necessity today when we didn't in the past because it is a necessity today when it wasn't in the past.

That being said, I don't think that encryption is necessary for most aspects of amateur radio.

> Cryptography is used all over the internet today yet it it's illegal to encrypt radio transmissions.

One key differentiator: bandwidth is fundamentally limited in radio.

The bandwidth is not only extremely limited, it’s shared over an enormous range. When you key the mic on a good 80m transmitter, you’re claiming that little slice of spectrum for a million+ square miles.

I think a lot of the new applications of digital modes would avoid conflict by starting off up in the 5 to 10 GHz range and work its way down.

The license conditions are there to keep the airwaves open. By convention, Amateur Radio is pretty much used as a way to meet new people around the county / world. It’s set up as a public commons, and encrypted traffic goes against that spirit.

There is nigh on constant pressure from government regulators to take back the spectrum. One of the best political arguments the Hams have for maintaining amateur radio is that it is a common public space, like a park, or a town square.

The worry is that if encryption were commonplace then you end up with a public park filled with anonymous men in hooded sweatshirts and ski masks, whispering to each other. The park gets closed.

It’s not illegal per se. You must have a license (and therefore a callsign, your identity) to operate legally, and you lose your license if you are caught using encryption.

If encryption was legal the commercial sector would take over and fill all available bandwidth. The lack of encryption is what keeps it amateur and not commercial.

Absolutely this.

Not going to happen. Amateur radio is very centrally about non-commercial use cases, with the encryption ban ensuring that's actually the case and trivially detected if not. Mesh networks for use by everybody for any purpose are a (valuable!) very different thing, living in differently regulated bands.

> living in differently regulated bands

People keep repeating that, but it's not actually true. There are no bands available for long range (50-100 miles between hops), decentralized, encrypted, mesh networks that are cheap enough for random people to connect to.

You're probably thinking of random wifi meshnets that only work in densely populated cities. That's very different, and the limitations of those networks is exactly why HAM radio meshnets are so attractive.

I meant more structural, based on your mention of NYC Mesh: high-speed, carrying all-purpose (including commercial) traffic for random users. You are not getting that by allowing encryption on ham bands, that's fundamentally something different (and regulation world-wide would never allow that under "amateur radio"). What you want for that is expanded spectrum/power/easier permits for long-distance links, e.g. in the 60 Ghz band or even in WiFi bands.

Edit: or in reverse, what kind of current ham radio use would you want to use more openly? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your scenario.

Edit2: E.g. the closest thing maybe is hamnet. Which is literally IP networking, unencrypted, on modified Ubiquiti or Mikrotik WLAN gear so it uses ham bands right next to its usual frequencies and more power. As soon as you take the amateur radio restrictions out, it's just long-distance wifi links, which already have a clear space what they are regulations-wise, the regulations just don't permit as much for it.

would it be possible for such a system to scale without overwhelming the spectrum?

I'm not a radio guy. But feels like if the mesh network became popular it could get clogged.

There's no ham bands where you're going to build a 50-100 mile range mesh network.

Most of the HF ham bands have kilohertz of bandwidth. These are the bands where you'll get propagation over the horizon. The better ham digital modes get ones of kilobits of data in good conditions. To get that sort of throughput you need good antennas on both ends and a fair amount of output power.

It's enough power to give someone bad RF burns and antennas large enough to require sturdy masts. The antennas alone will violate most HOAs. The output power requires some knowledge to be safe.

None of the equipment required for HF is cheap or easy that some rando can throw some up to participate in a mesh network.

Encryption on amateur bands is a non-starter. There's no practical difference between your fantasy encrypted HF mesh network and RF noise. That means there's no practical difference between you using such a network to chat with your buddies, businesses flooding the air with commercial traffic, and noise.

HF can affect huge areas due to propagation. If a business uses a HF mesh network for commercial traffic in the next town over from you, they can basically shut out you from using it. It also potentially shut me out in the next state over.

HF mesh networking is not very practical to begin with and the tiny slice of HF hams have it's just laughable.

I think the basic issue is folks hear RF and they think WiFi or LTE or Bluetooth and never experienced life on the other end of a 9.6kbps modem.

Imagine people within a half million square mile area trying to share enough bandwidth to eek out 5 tweets per second.

I think you assumed I was imagining high-bandwidth, but I was just thinking that even 80s dialup with BBS's or plaintext (encrypted) email would be useful, if it was long range and decentralized. That's absolutely possible with the HAM bands, especially shortwave.

> That's absolutely possible with the HAM bands, especially shortwave.

Such things already exist (Winlink, SailMail, etc) but you don't like them because there's no encryption and they don't have buzzwords like mesh in the names.

You seem to think encrypted transmissions on ham bands will let you play secret agent. All encryption will do is increase the noise floor on HF to the point its unusable by anyone. HF is already a noisy band but a bunch of people playing secret agent will swamp the bands over huge areas.

It's funny that you seem to think since I want decentralized long range encrypted mesh nets, I must be an idiot that doesn't know what I'm talking about. Or is it simply because I disagree with you?

You don’t actually need encryption for thing like IP networks and IRC.

I believe you are even allowed to use digital signatures, you just can’t encrypt the payloads. I would argue a digital signature is not “messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning”

So yeah, you can’t use it as your ISP but you can do quite a lot. The problem is finding enough other people in your area to set up nodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_multimedia_radio

I don't know what is going on in the ham radio space, but it does seem like there are a lot of potentially interesting applications.

Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.

I think it would be very popular even with just a clear text internet over ham radio. You would probably even need additional restrictions to keep it from being overrun - like maybe only dedicated "ham radio internet" web sites would be allowed, as opposed to being just access to the (standard) internet.

>Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.

You can't have traffic that is ssl, ssh, or any other encrypted protocol. Stop and think how useful a network you can have without that, no emails, no websites, no authenticated connections between computers.

The only things we have left are http, telnet and anonymous ftp.

Welcome to the 80s Arpanet, but anyone can modify your packets undetectably.

I get your point that a node in the network can transfer a different packet. But I think people will have to be more creative with the protocol. For example, other nodes can hear both your transmission and next hop and can detect the packet was changed. I'm not sure you could make it 100% reliably, but the network could be self policing. Hopefully it would be one of those things that doesn't work in theory, only in practice. (And if not, then the rules would have to be updated.)

Signing packets is not a new idea.

The problem still is that you have no way to authenticate on any layer above the hardware.

Ham radio as is is stuck in the 1960s which given the age of the people on it isn't really surprising.

Keep in mind the bandwidth is pretty limited. Even a single page view takes a fair amount of data these days.

However, signed packets do not violate the HAM rules, and is pretty common. People controlling systems (like repeaters) can ssh to them, with encryption disabled (there are patches), but still using signatures to avoid worries about packet modifications.

js8call for instance can do "mesh" networking, but the bandwidth is a few 10s of bytes per minute. But you can send messages through multiple hops to allow things like getting messages through to people you can't directly contact.

As soon as encryption was allowed, the Ham bands would be full of commercial traffic.

The main reason for encryption is to allow for self regulation, and if you can't self regulate if the traffic is encrypted.

yeah I don't want encryption on the amateur bands.

> Right now it's illegal to transmit encrypted data over the air

does this include caesar-shifted morse?

It’s not a technical restriction, it’s a semantic one (think spirit vs letter of law).

is that a yes?

I actually think this is an excellent point and a good path forward. There's a LOT of spectrum available for this, and the HF bands could be particularly interesting. Right now we have large swaths of the bands used by contesters and rag chewers. That could be used for useful TCP/IP experimentation by hobbyists, which is what the hobby was intended to be.

Each of those rag chewers is a scientist doing experiments. He or she must build a station suitable to be heard. Which antenna works best in their own case? What about feedline? This is not a simple task, especially for the ragchewer class where you want to be clearly heard.

You have a very narrow view of the hobby.

Rather than downvote me, address why you think I’m wrong.

The entirety of HF is barely more spectrum than a single wifi channel.

There's nothing stopping experimentation with HF packet today, but you have to be realistic about what you can accomplish.

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