FCC wants to bolster amateur radio
radioworld.com
radioworld.com
Great work!
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-16-96A1_Rcd.pdf
I would love to live in a world where the FCC could update outdated regulation within 50 days in response to a random internet comment to a commissioner...but that's not this universe.
Government that works only works for the cleptocracy.
Never never never aks for government that works.
Edit: I think this comment helps explain it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38053342
I ran the calculations for LTE in a FM radio station allocation a few years back and came up with something like 1.4Mbps on a CAT4 radio (no idea what modulation and FEC levels I assumed).
In the 80's, the FCC put limits on digital signals below 30MHz based on "baud rate". A baud is a raw bit in a digital data stream, it can either be data or part of the channel protocol. For example, a typical serial port like you have on a PC or an Arduino or something might operate at 9600 baud, each "chunk" consisting of a start bit, 8 data bits, and a stop bit. That is a total of 10 bauds, two of them, the start bit and the stop bit, are part of telling the circuit where the data starts and stops. So 9600 baud sends 960, 8 bit bytes per second over the line or only 7,680 bits per second. With me so far?
Okay, so the reason baud rates were used is because digital modes were modulated using a technique calls "frequency shift keying" or FSK. Frequency shift keying would send one tone for a zero bit, and one tone for a one bit. Those tones were detected with a circuit called a tone detector circuit and typically they needed a few tens of cycles of the tone to reliably detect the tone. A higher frequency tone meant you could detect it sooner (shorter time for the detector to latch on to the frequency) and that would give you a higher baud rate. But if you're modulating a higher frequency tone on to an RF carrier, it creates a wider impact on the spectrum and everything else was predicated on 2.5kHz max width voice channels. So allowing a faster baudrate, using FSK modulation, would result in digital modes taking up way more spectrum and thus limit the number of users.
But between then and now, there has been a freakin' Cambrian explosion of modulation techniques because digital signal processing is just math. We have a whole stable of techniques in the barn because of this, And as a result, you can put a lot more bits on a channel without pushing the spectrum bandwidth out.
A lot of people have pointed out to the FCC that making the limit baud rate based was silly if they really wanted it to be a spectrum bandwidth limit. Just make it that, and the experimental folks will compete to see how many bauds they can fit into that space.
I will admit I am biased, I'm one of those folks who got back into Amateur Radio because I was playing around with SDRs and wanted to start trying new modulation techniques. I am not motivated by "QSOs in every state" or every country, I'm motivated by "I just pulled an image off a weather balloon over the Atlantic ocean on 20 meters!" and "I can see my beacon 500 miles away on the KiwiSDR network!" things like that. So this change is really going to open up a lot of space for experimentation for me and I can't wait.
Would love to see an S11 sweep on a proper VNA for that antenna. I bet it looks like a polynomial with a googol order. On some bands the feed might be a better antenna.
My antenna comment was more about the launch angle. It was in inverted V which was steep aka a "cloud burner".
I've got a couple mostly horizontal wires running along the length of my living room--the speaker wires from my A/V receiver to my rear surround speakers.
I've wondered if that could be used as an HF antenna while simultaneously still being used for the speakers?
The audio signals for the speakers are all below 20 kHz. The radio signals I'd want to receive (and maybe transmit) are all about 1 MHz.
The idea then would be to put low pass filters on the audio connections and high pass filters on the radio connections. The cut off for the filters could be somewhere in the middle between 20 kHz and 1 MHz, so that both the audio signals and radio signals are far enough way from the cut off that the filter is flat.
Could that actually work or is it likely to fry the A/V receiver and/or the speakers and/or the radio?
For folks just playing around receiving HF I find the YouLoop[1] is a low cost and very effective magnetic loop antenna that you can set up on a wall in a dorm room (or living room :-) or pretty much anywhere. The Airspy HF+ discovery[2] is probably the best valued HF SDR you could use with that, but it works well with RTL-SDR V4 dongles[3] as well and the RT832 ones from NoElec[4] although NoElec and the V3 or earlier dongles don't go below about 55 MHz and need an upconverter like the HamItUp! [5] to move the bottom part of the HF spectrum up into a region the RTL832T receiver can tune them. (the V4 RTL-SDR dongle has an internal up converter for this purpose).
[1] Youloop magnetic loop antenna -- https://airspy.com/youloop/
[2] AirSpy HF Discovery + -- https://airspy.com/airspy-hf-discovery/
[3] RTL-SDR "dongle" V4 (low end ~1 Mhz) -- https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-blog-v4-dongle-initial-relea...
[4] NoElec NESDR SMArT (low end 55 MHz) -- https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-receivers/nesdr-smart-...
[5] HamItUp! -- https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-addons/upconverters-do...
You can do more with 5 watts and a decent directional antenna than 100 watts with a turd on a stick.
If we wanna be pedantic, a baud is not a bit, it's a symbol. It may be equivalent in some modulation schemes but in things like quadrature amplitude modulation, 1 baud > 1 bit. It goes up to 32768-QAM at 15 bits per symbol.
That said building large constellation QAM modulator/demodulators is a lot of fun I've discovered, but building real world modems that can deal with fading, reflections, and multipath takes away the fun pretty quickly :-).
Now suppose you have a red flag and a green flag as well, and assign black = 00, white = 01, red = 10, and green = 11.
If it still takes you one second to change flags, the baud rate is still one. However, each symbol change now encodes two bits, so the bit rate has doubled, to two bits per second.
I guess there's gatekeeping NIMBYs in the amateur radio bands as well!
I have long since traded my license for a better life of being a decadent man of international mystery, but I do remember as a very casual CW operator getting mauled by people semi-regularly for violations of people's waterfall displays with my drifty ass analogue transceiver and newbie hand.
I do share your disdain for stupid and/or incorrect nomenclature. Like "Wi-Fi." WTF, there's no use of "fidelity" that this is short for.
In a similar way, ThunderBolt™ links don't use thunder, or bolts.
"ThunderBolt" is an invalid comparison because it's not a rip-off of a known earlier and widely-used term, the way "Wi-Fi" is.
> How did “amateur” become “ham”? The real answer is unknown! Even before radio, telegraphers referred to a poor operator as a ham. Perhaps this was derived from a poor operator being “ham-fisted” on the telegraph key — an operator’s “fist” referred to his or her distinctive style over the wires. With all radio stations sharing the same radio spectrum in the early days, commercial and military operators would sometimes refer to amateurs as hams when there was interference. Regardless, amateurs adopted the term as a badge of honor and proudly refer to each other as “hams” today.
While you'd buy the latest 5th edition from the ARRL [1] to prepare for the exam, the older 3rd edition is freely available online [2].
[1] https://www.arrl.org/ham-radio-license-manual
[2] https://macaloney.blogspot.com/2019/06/how-to-prepare-for-ha...
The Winlink people have already channelized large swaths of the CW and data subbands, and this just takes more spectrum away from people who will likely be occupying the frequency when a Vara session fires up on top of them.
That kind of behavior is not only inconsiderate, it is still against the rules.
It isn’t just CW, PSK31, wspr and others are modes already affected by the current rules. Allowing 2.8 khz bandwidth will only make it worse.
Just last week I had my PSK31 QSO crushed by a Vara session.
EDIT: you should look at the shanon-Hartley limit. The bandwidth is proportional to the symbol rate.
This is not the case for classical frequency-shift amateur radioteletype. This sends two tones on single sideband, at 2125 Hz or 2295 Hz. So it uses up about 2.3KHz of bandwidth no matter how low the baud rate goes. 45.45 baud is classic mechanical Teletype speed, so the bandwidth is about 50x the data rate in that mode. You can do FSK up to maybe 600 baud; you need a few cycles to detect the tone frequency with classical filters. 300 is a traditional limit. Beyond that antique technology, you need a modulation scheme less than half a century old.
You equally could have used a narrower filter.
Before everything went digital, this sort of thing tended to involve a chain of analog processing stages.
Which of course meant two sets of sidebands (eg four in total) and a excessively wide signal..
But any of the better quality transmitters (Ham, Commercial or military) used pure FSK directly.
However, amateur radio has some natural conservatism to it, like Morse code requirements (since retired) to gatekeep the hobby. Getting rid of this baud rate limit is long overdue as analog transmissions are laughably archaic for anything outside amateur radio.
To understand this further, let's consider a more advanced modulation scheme. Instead of just having two states (high and low) to represent binary bits, imagine we have four distinct states: high, medium-high, medium-low, and low. These states can represent combinations of bits as follows: high = 11, medium-high = 10, medium-low = 01, and low = 00.
In this scenario, each state transition represents a symbol, and since each symbol can represent two bits, the symbol rate (or baud rate) is half of the bit rate. If you know the symbol rate and want to determine the bit rate, you'd multiply the symbol rate by the number of bits per symbol. In this example, you'd multiply the baud rate by two.
Most signals rely on techniques beyond simple voltage differences though to transfer information, and that's when you delve into the world of RF theory. Instead of a discrete voltage, a sine wave is used at a particular frequency. The amplitude of the sine wave can be adjusted just like we adjusted the voltage on that line. If we want even more symbols, maybe 0000 to 1111 or bigger, we can introduce another variation to the sine wave called phase. Phase of a sine wave is just shifting it left or right, but could be visualized as two people on a race track. If they start a race from the same line and run at the same speed in the same direction, they're in phase. If one of them starts a quarter of the way ahead from the other and they both run at the same speed in the same direction, then he's a quarter phase shifted from the other.
That adjustment of phase and amplitude falls into a broad category of RF modulation called QAM, and it's used in more than RF between two radios. It can also be used over Ethernet or PCIe busses.
I could go on rambling for a long time on all this, but hopefully this helps answer your question.
The hobby already struggles with gatekeeping/driving off people who don't "ham right" and so making the hobby more accessible is a big positive in my book.
As long as you are Part 97 compliant, what exactly is your problem?
I mean the most basic CQ is dah dit dah dit - dah dah dit dah. You don't heard the dots or the dashes, you hear the rhythm. You don't see the CQ either, you know the concept from the rhythm as part of the conversation.
Btw, original American Morse had extra symbols!
I would understand perhaps semaphore because anyone can wave their arms about and communicate long distances.
But since radio requires equipment anyway, you might as well use modern digital equipment - with the benefit that in the same amount of time, power and bandwidth that a morse signal would use, you can send 10,000x more data.
Morse is the ultimate narrowband mode. The cleaner your oscillator and the narrower your output the better. On the receive side, you can make your receiver as narrow at the transmitters oscillator.
The only comparable digital mode is on-off keying which is used by cheap, low data rate devices. Even 'narrow' digital modes are wideband compared to morse code.
"On the receive side, you can make your receiver as narrow at the transmitters oscillator". Completely wrong, and shows a fundamental misunderstanding.
Morse is a wonderful mode, but suffers from the lack of error correction which had made modes like PSK31 and FT8 so much more effective, especially in bandwidth usage.
Clrly yu hve never usd this on the bands.
Yes, the error correction is between the operator ears. It is not a mode that can easily automated.
CW is wonderful, but is has long since been superseded by more modern digital modes.
You can easily use a transmitter with Gaussian keying to reduce the sidebands to zero.
The sidebands in CW ARE the information. If there were no sidebands, there would be no information.
> When the key is down there is no modulation whatsoever.
No, but you can't keep the key down forever. The information is in the transition from Key-down to Key-up (and Vice/versa). Which is why the modulation envelope (eg bandwidth) has to be tailored to the keying speed.
> You can easily use a transmitter with Gaussian keying to reduce the sidebands to zero.
Gausian keying requires a Raised-Cosine envelope. It is this which contains the sidebands and the information, and causes the B/W to be widened.
https://www.w8ji.com/cw_bandwidth_described.htm
and see "An Improved Audio-Frequency Bandpass Filter for Morse Code Reception" by James L. Tonne, W4ENE"
http://www.tonnesoftware.com/downloads/CWBPF-As-Submitted-To...
The FCC set the rules, not a bunch of old farts upset that the morse code test was eliminated. But because the FCC doesn’t pay much attention to the Part 97 service, it has taken them this long to get around to updating the rules.
This change was proffered as far back as 2008 at a Dayton TAPR session.
When these rules were adopted, a phone call to Europe was $3 per minute and a Telex as $10 for thirty words.
There are other restrictions like this. For instance, in my country, only clubs are allowed to transmit analog TV continously. Individuals can only make short transmissions.
Some people argue that increasing the bandwidth would incentivize digital modes. I can understand the point, but I would rather experiment with low-bandwidth modes than to take larger portions of the spectrum with faster, potentially wasteful modes.
That's correct, more or less.
There's this thing called "frequency shift keying" (FSK) which was the de facto standard digital modulation technique at the time the regulations were created. With FSK, you transmit data by toggling back and forth between two frequencies. That abrupt jumping back-and-forth creates hellish interference for people trying to use nearby frequencies.
Today, the obvious solution is to limit bandwidth so that there's a healthy amount of space for people to avoid that interference. However, in a (1970s/1980s) world where FSK is the only widespread modulation scheme, that wasn't really the mindset. The way they saw it was simpler: "higher baudrates demand more bandwidth, and more bandwidth creates more interference." Thus, they regulated baudrate as a means of regulating bandwidth.
The impetus for the rule change is simple: we have better modulation techniques nowadays. In case I haven't bored you to death, the simplest one to explain is probably GFSK. It's similar to FSK, but instead of abruptly jumping between the two frequencies, you gradually slide back and forth between them (the "G" stands for Gaussian). GFSK requires more precise electronics, but it doesn't cause as much trouble for people trying to operate at nearby frequencies. There are countless other modulation techniques as well. Bluetooth is probably the most notable implementation of GFSK (though modern Bluetooth actually uses something else).
For completeness: FSK is very useful and it's still widely used today. Your garage door opener uses it, among other things.
If you’re not aware, hams have for many years received paltry (at best) support from the FCC in terms of any enforcement.
Could you expand on what you mean here? What enforcement is lacking?
Search for "section 8 of the communications" to find the place within the bill text where it requires the FCC to start charging such fees.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1625
It replaced an annual fee, though, so if you were in it for the long run, you came up ahead - but it hardly is the best sell-in to a new hobby that first you need to study for a test, then, if you pass,pay $180 and only then can you start figuring out if it is for you...
Unfortunately dieing off is exactly what's happening :(
Then when the neoliberals came to power, this changed. They view the radio spectrum as a natural resource from which they need to extract maximum profit. This coincided with the rise of mobile phones and an ever-increasing demand for radio spectrum. They moved the regulating angency from under the ministry of transportation to the ministry of economic affairs. This meant that the attitude changed a lot: HAMs were viewed as 'freeloaders', spectrum for mobile operators etc was auctioned off for billions, and policing was restricted to only following up on issues that impacted operations of major spectrum holders or made the press. I'm pretty sure that the only thing keeping them from taking spectrum away to auction off to multinationals, are international agreements.
One example: When highly popular central heating company "Vaillant" introduced a new digital model which caused emissions from the wiring between the heater and the thermostat that jammed the 2m repeater band, it took a LOT of complaining to finally get the regulator to take action. At this point these heaters had been sold so much that it took years to resolve it.
Of course there were other developments at this time which caused a major decline in HAM population. Like the internet and home computer. Until then the big thing a geek would have at home would be a radio shack, but since the internet and mobile phone the whole "I can talk to anyone in the world from my attic!!!" had lost a lot of its shine. But I do believe the above really was the reason why at least our regulator changed its views so heavily.
This has always felt backwards and I hope it leads to some more interesting modes across the bands.
It'll be interesting to see just how much data can be pushed through 2800 Hz of bandwidth in the real world, at long distance.
[1] https://www.radioworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/DOC-39...
“...Amateur stations will be permitted to commence operations after a 30 day period unless UTC notifies the station that its fixed location is within one kilometer of Power Line Carrier (PLC) systems operating on the same or overlapping frequencies. This notification process will ensure that amateur stations seeking to operate in the above noted bands are located beyond a minimum separation distance from PLC transmission lines, which will help ensure the compatibility and coexistence of amateur and PLC operations, and promote shared use of the bands.”
Also, you can still receive all you want.
> pipewire-screenaudio: https://github.com/IceDBorn/pipewire-screenaudio :
>> Extension to passthrough pipewire audio to WebRTC Screenshare
> awesome-amateur-radio#sdr https://github.com/mcaserta/awesome-amateur-radio#sdr
> The OpenWRT wiki lists a few different weather station apps that can retrieve, record chart, and publish weather data from various weather sensors and also from GPIO or SDR; pywws, weewx
> weewx: https://github.com/weewx/weewx
> A WebSDR LuCI app would be cool.
What are some other interesting applications for [digital] terrestrial radio (in service of bolstering support for amateur radio)?
What could K12cs "Q12" STEM science classes do to encourage learning of this and adjacent EM skills?
https://www.arrl.org/news/congresswoman-lesko-reintroduces-b...
It’s kind of unfortunate this type of decision requires Congress.
All the major weak signal HF digital modes use low baud rates anyway to better deal with multipath interference that's common at those frequencies. Really the only mode we couldn't use here was PACTOR 4 - that was the mode people kept getting waivers of the rule for.
I would also love to see some (not all) uhf band allow encryption. While amateur radio service is about communicating with others, services like winlink and digital messaging are hampered without encryption and become unsafe for the operators. This would also make internet relay possible and legal in uhf.
How so?
It's like pre-https internet basically.
This also means winlink shouldn't be used for PII (which is sort of important in an emergency!).
If you can at least key exchange and encrypt between you and the next node, you have some safeguards and your messages aren't in the clear - but that is currently prohibited by the regs.
Digital signatures are permissible under the current rules and in principle avoid this issue although the software tooling around it isn't there. Similar example: Debian packages are transmitted over HTTP, but this isn't a problem because they are authenticated with GPG.
If the idea is an “if you have a license, send whatever data you want because it’s encrypted” limited allocation then I might be into that. Sharing the spectrum would be complicated.
Whether that space is used for meshtastic, AREDN, etc is up to the local band plan. Leave some for experimenters.
Even APRS (which I realize is usually vhf) would benefit - sms over aprs meant all your phone numbers were public.
IIRC there's more bandwidth in just the 2.4GHz ISM band than all of the ham bands combined. If you want to blast noise (what your encrypted signal appears as) use ISM bands. Don't blast noise on ham bands.
But I'd also bet a dollar that someone fails to understand the difference and gets their undies in a massive twist about it.
I think Section 97 is what you're referring to. If so, it's not obstruction of purpose the FCC forbids; it's obstruction of meaning.
Section 97: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
Throughout part 97, there is a repeated prohibition of transmitting "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning." If I understand it correctly, there are many accepted ways to encode a message, but those encoding methods are (and must be) published and publicly accessible. I think that encrypting a message so that only certain people could decipher it would fall under the category of "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning." Yes, you could encrypt a message with a published standard, but to be legal I think there would have to be some specific exceptions made to allow it because it ultimately runs afoul of the spirit of that rule.
You miss the point, it is not about communication as in having a conversation. HAM radio is about testing technical skills of setting it up and being able to test those technical skills to set up communication channel.
If you want to have encryption go to enterprise solutions and restricted bandwidths. Encryption will make asshole companies to use bandwidth for their use without paying and will make all spectrum suck.
That is why you have call signs and all communications open for everyone to listen to because it is for public experimentation not for some private chats or data exchange.
Yes, but, running a "yep, I can hear that" test is a lot less interesting and motivating, for most people, than being able to actually do something quasi-practical with the radio link.
I think it'd open up the possibilities of like, weather balloons streaming their telemetry openly, while ensuring the data they're reporting hasn't been forged, or letting anyone send random commands to it.
That's already allowed, and commonly done.
97.113(a)(4) doesn't say "no cryptography", it says (in part):
>> No amateur station shall transmit [...] messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning.
The scheme you're describing doesn't obscure the meaning of your transmissions, so it is perfectly legal.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
Rhetorically speaking, what does one do with the fox once it's caught? In particular one experimenting with TAK?
I don't see any real push for a public service like ham to allow outright encryption. Channels feel like they should be for public use. We can get many guarantees, if we need them, without obfuscating the messages.
I disagree: with a finite, shared resource like radio spectrum (and especially the amateur bands), I think it would be too easy for people to abuse if other folks couldn't inspect it.
As it stands, many find it annoying that PACTOR (as useful as it is) is able to keep hidden their proprietary encoding secret (though generally used on marine bands, which doesn't necessarily have the same open-ness restrictions):
* 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20386875
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACTOR
* https://www.bwsailing.com/bw/ssb-email-and-weather-made-easy...
That's exactly the reason why encryption is banned. The authorities, as well as amateur radio representatives don't want ham radio to become yet another internet channel, with all the commercial activity that happens there.
There are many ways of sending secure messages, but few truly public spaces.
That’s stupid world war 2 technology.
— N9EX
I've always considered amateur radio to be the "national parks" of radio spectrum. Maybe better termed as "international parks," since the vast majority of nations embrace it much as we in the United States do. Ham radio is certainly an important player in average-Joe diplomacy, in which we can still engage in dialog with radio technicians and operators from practically all the countries of the world without the government and mass-media filters we normally have to deal with. Even though much of our discussions are centered on radio topics and family life (politics are usually kept aside), the mere fact that we are talking in a relaxed format with folks from almost anywhere is a joy to experience!
There is a huge spectrum of things you can do and the amount of money you can spend. You can get into it for $50, but the sky is the limit.
I'd look online for a local club and contact them. Around me, they will bend over backwards to get someone into it.
>I'd look online for a local club and contact them. Around me, they will bend over backwards to get someone into it.
This is very good to know. Do you know of any in the Boston area?
If you want to do HF and long distances, then get your General license and HF radio.
There is someone near me that uses APRS to beacon out the state of their solar/batteries at a remote cabin.
Any links/videos/books you may be able to suggest would be of great interest as well.
encode your data within natural language and transmit using a natural sounding text to speech engine
Maybe some AM Radio stations are already actually numbers stations V2.0
This is fucking great, and I hope it goes through.
Amateur radio will continue losing to the internet where actual growth and innovation is happening instead of old guys larping how they are going to save the world by knowing morse code or something.
Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial and be able to observe the traffic. That would die with widespread encryption.
Your insulting of people who try to maintain radios for emergencies is unnecessary, too.
No, it is not. Hobbyist web masters practically all use encryption. It should be possible to use modern protocols like HTTPS. Encryption is the default of modern network protocols. On the internet trasitioning from a hobby website to a commercial one is seamless.
>Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial and be able to observe the traffic.
MitM attacks are a security vulnerability. If people want to observe traffic they should observe their own traffic. His is like saying that we shouldn't use Rust because students will be unable to exploit vulnerabilities.
>Your insulting of people who try to maintain radios for emergencies is unnecessary, too.
Unneccessary, but their use case is rather niche compared to what we see the internet used for. It is a sign of stagnation.
For example, it would be pretty rad to have an event with an orchestra linked between two nearby cities with full duplex ultra low latency radio--- which can achieve much lower latency than ordinary internet due to the line-of-sight nature.
Now I realize that by 'broadcast' you don't mean the rule-violating one-way-communications kind but the literal propagation characteristics. But at UHF+ it's easier to have a directional signal than an omnidirectional one, and once you get to a few GHz it's quite natural to have laser beam like signals. Plus, at 2m+ signals are naturally limited to the radio horizon (except for exceptional cases).
Personally, when I've advocated for relaxations on encryption and other content restrictions I've done so for UHF+ (or even SHF+) bands where the degree of under-utilization and potential for spectrum reuse through directionality are very high, and abuse is inherently geographically limited by physics.
And that's exactly the kind of transition people into ham radio don't want.
> MitM attacks are a security vulnerability.
A vulnerability on what security? Everything done on the ham bands is public, it makes no sense to transmit on these bands and not want to be heard. It makes sense if you are trying to send a secret message, which is what ham is explicitly not about.
As for the comparison with Rust. The Rust memory model is about preventing bugs. But the lack of private communication on public ham bands is a feature, not a bug. The Rust of ham radio would be a system that prevents accidental encryption and ensures that everything is understandable by everyone.
If you want the internet, use the internet. There are already many frequency bands for that.
Which is a problem. It would be cool to experiment in these bands and then later switch to others when you want to commercialize.
>A vulnerability on what security?
If you wanted to send a private message to someone the expectation is that the message should be private and not publically snoopable.
>Everything done on the ham bands is public
Everything on the internet is public too in the sense that people who can listen in between have access to what is sent.
>If you want the internet, use the internet.
This is accepting defeat to the internet. I say that we should see more competition.
I think here is the misunderstanding. There is no competition. Ham operators happily use the internet to communicate when appropriate and at the same time use the ham bands for playing with their radio equipment. I don't think many of them want to use their radios to do what they do with their smartphones and vice versa.
It is like saying that gliders and airliners are in competition. Even if both are about aerodynamics, no glider pilot is mad because using a glider is inconvenient for travelling overseas, no one thinks gliders have "lost" to airliners because of the insistance on not using engines (motorgliders exist but they are still inadequate for practical travel). Glider pilots take the plane like everyone else when going on vacation.
It doesn't mean gliders are useless, a few of them have practical applications, and they make excellent training for "useful" plane pilots, in fact most of the best airline pilots have flown gliders, and some still do.
Same idea with ham radio. Mostly but not completely impractical, and many of the people who now work with "useful" radios like the one that's in your phone giving you internet access started as amateurs.
Go look at a spectrum chart. If you're worried about stagnation, go after the stupidly under-utilised swathes of military allocations. Let the hobbyists keep their narrow kHz. Not everything needs disruption.
Have you considered that there may not be any secrets because it doesn't allow for privacy? The law is holding it back from its true potential.
I disagree. The vast majority of modern hobbyist radio technology involves encryption as an integral part-- both because the ease of abuse has made cryptography a mandatory feature for communications generally, because radio censorship rules are incompatible with lots of perfectly reasonable communications (you can't lawfully read HN over the radio, for example, because posts can and sometimes do contain naughty-words... you can't even read most ham radio internet message boards over the radio!) and because it's a standard part of existing protocols and software designed for usage over the internet.
The ham prohibitions on encryption are just keeping that usage out of ham bands which, particularly in UHF remain somewhere between dead and completely dead. This will ultimately result in our loss of these allocations, and the experimental usage is hampered by the restrictions in the ISM bands and the lack of potential for coordination that comes from having identified and competent operators.
> Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial and be able to observe the traffic. That would die with widespread encryption.
Digital modes in general break this, because there is a proliferation of them and some are only readable if you pay considerable licensing fees or buy special licensed hardware. I disagree that this is an essential part of the radio as it's already not true. Though, one could preserve it to a degree by requiring some amount of plaintext identification of the traffic, the identities of the parties and the purpose of the communication.
> Your insulting of people who try to maintain radios for emergencies is unnecessary, too.
If you're at all familiar with amateur radio usage in the US you've probably encountered wackers. Heck, even if you are considered one yourself by others you've probably seen people worse than you. The ancestors post didn't suggest that all emergency prep activity is excessively LARPY, at least by my read.
The excessive restrictions harm more boring usage like "I want to check my email from the woods on infrastructure that I built and maintain". The larpy usage doesn't care, because it's mostly fantasy and if there were some doomsday event no one is going to care what encryption you're using (or at least won't be able to do anything about it). :)
Amateur radio bands are not intended to work as ghetto ISP bands.
Whether there should be some lowers band available for that is another discussion.
So long as identification is still decodable, spectrum usage can be managed.
It's sufficient to prohibit commercial usage you don't need plaintext to do so. The old threat of tow trucks and cab services moving onto ham-bands had long since been mooted by ubiquitous cellular, but even if it weren't any significant commercial usage will eventually have a whistleblower. Usage that is obscure enough to not be vulnerable to whistleblowers could also be hidden just as well in "plaintext" traffic that was really uncrackable steganography.
As it stands you can't even lawfully log into your own personal systems over amateur radio even if you take the unreasonable steps of using specially modified software to authenticate-but-not-encrypt because inevitably some third party will send a message to you via the internet that contains some naughty words that aren't permitted over the radio.
Without relaxing the encryption rules, innovative radio usage like meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/) will continue to be pushed onto ISM bands where (1) they're still technically unlawful because the homebrew hardware is not type-accepted (amateur bands are the ONLY place where homebrew intentional radiators are allowed!) and (2) where the band choices, power limit, and EIRP limits are detrimental to full exploration of the possibilities.
Besides, the FCC has long allowed proprietary, license fee bearing, patent encumbered digital modes. These are very close to encryption in terms of their ability to lock others out of ham comms, and have frequently been used by amateur radio groups to establish "lid free" communications channels. (Because most of the more irritating people aren't technically sophisticated enough to adopt some new mode without help, and people won't help them...).
The rules as they stand punish honest people who follow the intent and spirit of the rule in favor of people willing to just ignore the rules (including operating unlawful devices in ISM bands), willing to use stego, or willing to use obscure protocols to achieve the same ends that they'd otherwise achieve with encryption. It blocks modern networking by disallowing standard internet-grade software use with radio since all of it has integral encryption which generally can't be disabled to prevent downgrading and cross domain attacks in contexts where the encryption is needed -- or because in some cases the protocols are designed in such a way that authentication without encypherment isn't possible.
73s, NT4TN
Practically in those locations the likelihood is that they won't interfere with anyone at all in any case. In which case it's irrelevant.
What's vastly worse than a bit of misuse is losing the bands entirely.
We've essentially lost 9cm (half already, the rest when the FCC finishes selling off the half). But for a few hundred KHz used for EMEers (whos numbers are only in the hundreds) the bands higher than 23cm are essentially unused, and 23cm has quite limited usage.
There is tons of UHF+ non-commercial and experimental radio activity going on _outside_ of amateur radio however, innovative things with SDR and mesh networking to gives some examples-- but due to antiquated content restrictions its operating (usually unlawfully) on the ISM bands and struggling with interference from other activity there and with low power limits (even though much of the experimental usage is unlawful, it still stays usually stays low power since folk wisdom says that's what keeps the enforcement away). These applications are squarely within the purpose of amateur radio and to the extent that they used non-certified homebrew hardware and antennas the amateur service is the only place they could lawfully operate.
But in practice the content restrictions have more force than the requirement for type-certification, and the ISM bands don't have hall monitors, so as a result the vast majority of interesting UHF+ radio experimentation is outside of the amateur service currently. This is a serious danger to the continuation of the amateur allocations. (at least up at those frequencies).