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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

> And it will be hard to argue that spectrum reserved for amateur use and experimentation should not be sold off to commercial users if hardly any amateurs are taking advantage of it.

> many are interested in the capacity for public service, such as providing communications in the wake of a disaster (...) having grown up with technology and having seen the impact of climate change, Michel says. They see how fragile cellphone infrastructure can be.

They provided an argument for the preservation of the spectrum in their own text. Amateur Radio gives communities a means of long distance communication when all other infrastructure fails. That redundancy and resilience are precious and worthy of preserving.

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Well sure! But given that it’s so important why reserve it for amateurs? Why isn’t a spectrum dedicated for use by police, fire, emergency response, and local governments who would be required to have the equipment on site and at least one person on staff trained to use it?

And then if you’re not within some reasonable distance to a HAM operator then you as a civilian can apply for a license so you have a way to reach emergency services.

Like this seems like a self defeating argument that HAM is crucial for emergency situations because if I agreed with you the logical thing to do would be to take it away.

> Why isn’t a spectrum dedicated for use by police, fire, emergency response, and local governments

What do you think their radio systems use?

> Why isn’t a spectrum dedicated for use by police, fire, emergency response, and local governments

There is, hams use a small fraction of the available frequencies and the FCC manages all frequencies in the USA to help commercial and non-commercial users share the available frequencies.

So taxis, commercial trucks, FRS radios, radar, fire, police, ambulance, marine radios, cell phones, CB radios, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, time sync services, etc all have allocations managed by the FCC. Similar organizations exist in most (all?) countries.

> Amateur Radio gives communities a means of long distance communication when all other infrastructure fails.

Starlink and a car battery can do the same thing, though. HAM radio has a future, but it needs to adapt.

Starlink needs a commercial contract with a company that may choose to terminate your service or be dictated to do so.

Starlink contracts specify a cell region in which you're receiver can work.

If you fall out with a benevolent or not so benevolent government or you are running away from disaster region or war zone all of these solutions fall apart pretty quickly.

I will repeat my own quote, Amateur Radio gives communities a means of long distance communication when all other infrastructure fails.

> If you fall out with a benevolent or not so benevolent government or you are running away from disaster region or war zone all of these solutions fall apart pretty quickly.

That use case would be suicidal without encryption. I'll repeat my quote also - HAM radio has a future, but it needs to adapt.

Not necessarily, there are a lot of variables. If someone is a fugitive of a government and is using ham radio while also being stationary, sure. I think most HAMs are aware they can track signals that are stationary quiet well. After all, the cats who get caught breaking the rules are usually doing it daily for months. Think of the occasional crazy old bat who decides to do a pirate radio station. But so long as the individual is on the move it becomes more difficult. That is also supposing a government from a federal down to local level are monitoring all ham frequencies 24/7.

Now if we are talking like a rebellious faction within a country, well they are technically breaking all other rules of the nation anyways, so no-encryption HAM rules suddenly becomes the line in the sand they draw as to not cross?

That's a pretty far-out use case, if you even specified one. The utility of a long range, decentralized, encrypted mesh net is pretty broad in comparison.

I'm all for the idea of a long range, decentralized, encrypted mesh net. I've read a fair number of papers proposing and analyzing different approaches to make this happen.

Unfortunately, unlike the internet, or a local mesh network the total collective bandwidth isn't there. If it worked people would try to do full duplex audio with loved ones, file sharing, monitoring GPS coordinates of fleets of vehicles, internet gateways, and a zillion other bandwidth intensive things.

Bandwidth is so low, that even sending bytes is rare, encoding that average a few bits per character are common. Such encodings try to minimize the bits by using less bits for more common english characters, so they often are measured in words per minute instead of bits or bytes.

There was exist various hybrid solutions like APRS (which can use ham + internet), winmail (ham + internet email), various digital radio protocols (ham to tower, which has an internet connection). But a pure radio mesh net just doesn't seem practical.

Done enough research into this that I'm familiar with the stuff you're describing. I remember looking into those packet radio protocols, and honestly, they seemed kinda rudimentary, especially (IIRC) the error correction algos. Seems like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in that area.

> I'm all for the idea of a long range, decentralized, encrypted mesh net. I've read a fair number of papers proposing and analyzing different approaches to make this happen.

What do you think the fundamental value of a meshnet would be? For my part, seems like an (encrypted) text-only system with high latency (15 minutes per paragraph, even) and a range of hundreds of miles between hops, would be preferable to something capable of streaming HD video that was restricted to hops of only a few hundred feet.

I think that's a fair comparison of what the physics can handle, and I think that if the former existed, there'd be a lot of people using it.

Edit: looks like I edited out from under you. Sorry, didn't think you'd see it so quick.

The bandwidth is so low it's a bit mind boggling. On a particular frequency you might well be broadcasting/interfering with a fair chunk of the united states and only managing 4.6 bits/sec. If it's 3 hops then divide that by 3. I just don't see any kind of metadata tracking of peers, requests, mesh status, etc being reasonable at that low bandwidth.

Sure, could a few people handle email like setups, sure. But even a small bump in popularity and it would be saturated and everything would break and nobody could use that frequency.

Once you adapt fully to that bandwidth I think you'd end up with things much like what we already have like winmail and js8call.

I'm not convinced there aren't ways to make it feasible. It would certainly select for high-value messages, and there'd have to be systems for avoiding DDOS-style attacks.

I remember doing a back of the napkin protocol for such a network, and assuming that most messages were tweet-sized and took 5 minutes to send. I get it, though I think you're describing a worst-case scenario. Bunps in popularity would just extend the latency. I think there's ways to overcome the problems and exploit the unique advantages.

The thing with things like JS8call is that it's still like using a postcard instead of a letter. I don't use postcards because I wouldn't put anything more than a superficiality on them.

Heh, well, a single tweet (280 char max) would take 486 seconds 8 minutes. Assuming you wanted just to send it a single hop in the USA. If you wanted three hops it would take 24 minutes and during that time significant chunks of the USA could not send tweets for 8 minutes at a time.

Imagine: 1:00pm SF transmits east of the sierras for 8 minutes. 1:08pm Someone east of the sierras transmits to someone east of the rockies 1:16pm Someone east of rockies transmits to someone on the coast 1:24pm Someone on the east cost receives a tweet

Keep in mind that from 1:00 to 1:16pm that nobody west of the rockies could tweet on the same frequency. So the effective tweets/hour would be something like a few per hour per frequency.

And it's not just latency that is added, if the demand exceeds the bandwidth available you'd never catch up.

Or to think of it another way, the USA over some theoretical mesh over HF couldn't keep up with this thread.

Hah, fair enough.

It's actually a pretty common use case, if employed properly. For example, I've heard that the Cuban expat community in Florida and their cohort still in-country will use HF radio to pass information. During the recent protests there was reports of the Cuban government employing signal jamming on frequencies associated with this. It gets harder to DF a signal if you use directional antennas and low power, short transmissions. Digital protocols help a lot with this. If you have a communications schedule with the receiving end and perhaps have exchanged one time pads, then setting up a temporary station at a pre-set time to transmit a message then book it, it'll be quite hard for anyone to catch you. And, of course, if you fall into this use case then laws concerning encryption are probably of lesser concern to you.

That's pretty cool. Though, again, that use case is viable because of encryption.

Unencrypted communications are better than none. You can arrange for an escape without mentioning a street address, social security number, or full name. Becoming a ham includes the knowledge to keep yourself from being easily tracked. Ham (at least in the USA) does have the idea that anything goes if you are trying to save someone's life.

Starlink isn't available to everyone.

Starlink has a maximum density of customers which is pretty low.

Starlink is not long range, you need a set of dishes and internet uplink in the same geographic area that you are in.

Starlink costs $100 a month, leaving a substantial community withotu service.

Amateur radio has no monthly cost, no maximum density, and no maximum range.

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