Encryption really isn’t in the spirit of ham radio, and the other licenses are honestly probably easier to get anyway.
Methods like spread-spectrum communication are allowed. It's not the same as encryption, but it it similar in that people without knowledge of the frequency hopping pattern are not capable of receiving the transmission [2].
Ultimately I'm not particularly invested in permitting encryption in amateur radio - my personal involvement is mostly homebrewing simple equipment - but I'd consider it a plus. I doubt it'd displace public participation around local repeaters and the existing radio activity.
1. https://www.arrl.org/about-arrl
2. Well, if they have an SDR with a wide enough bandwidth they can receive spread spectrum communications. And with modern SDR's that probably not that rare.
FHSS is pretty trivial to “decrypt” these days with an SDR.
While you’re not wrong about experimentation, I feel like ham radio should be focused more on the radio side of things rather than encryption implementations. Implementing the hardware and software encoding/decoding is the hard/fun part (at least to me). Encryption should come as a piece of cake after than if you can achieve a given bitrate.
And again - there already are bands that allow encryption. A couple hundred bucks and a few applications, and you’re free to go nuts.
And I completely forgot, but ISM bands do allow encryption, are free, and there is plenty of hardware out there readily available.
Thanks.
The M17 project found some low cost transceivers that operate on a pretty low level, and I think those would be relevant for future development on ISM for people wanting to use encryption.
Of course encryption is not impossible on HF, just a bit more difficult.
Whatever, both commercial and military uses are using encryption on HF.
https://www.wired.com/story/tetra-radio-encryption-backdoor/
This is why proprietary solutions are non-starters.
Civilians deserve real encryption they can control with provable privacy.
What’s more interesting to me is that the M17 project has found some chips on aliexpress that are lower level and work on a multitude of bands. I’m trying to find this and will update when I do.