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Comment by schmidtleonard | Hacker News Reader

The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now. There are other things ham radio could grow into, but the community does not seem to be interested in the radical change needed for them yet.

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I mainly make contacts with digital modes, and the whole point to bounce radio waves off ionosphere and record contacts with faraway people. The digital mode is better signal than voice, and don't have to talk to anyone.

Do actual conversations normally happen in digital modes (whether CW or one of the ones that need a computer)? I got my technician license years ago and quit for the reasons others have listed above but have considered getting back into it for digital HF, but I've gotten the impression that people mostly just exchange callsigns and signal reports then move on to the next contact. I'm basically looking for old internet chatroom vibes but over radio.

Most people use FT8 for doing contacts because it works with low signal and does the exchange, just have to click on the other person.

There is JS8Call which uses same technology for doing chats. There are older digital modes for chatting but my understanding is that they used less these days; PSK31 is only one heard about being used.

> The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now.

That's funny because it makes intuitive sense, but I'd argue the opposite.

As the internet has become more accessible and the world of HAM has remained fairly obscure (with some financial barrier to entry and government KYC sometimes), you're far more likely to encounter interesting and enthusiastic fellow nerds with HAM if you get into it.

It's a good thing that you don't need the community to do interesting things with radio signals, just an interest in doing so. Chatting with other people is just a nice side effect of working with signals sent over RF.

And when it comes to doing interesting things with technology, there are many other communities to collaborate with; someone might even build their own community of people who also want to chat over RF.

I was talking about commercial activity. Flouting the rules on that would be a bad idea. We need to change the rules, not flout them.

The core idea "individual accountability and exclusionary property rights are complementary mechanisms for sharing spectrum" is probably eternal, but HAM mindshare is sill stuck in the days when building kit and studying for a license was worth it to access the glorious nerd forum in the Earth's Ionosphere, and the internet flat out replaced that. HAM could reinvent itself as an on-ramp for ambitious young'uns with big ideas to challenge stodgy incumbent telecom if it wanted to, but right now it's coasting on the social groups that were formed back when its value proposition made sense and it will stay on a downward trajectory until it fixes this.

Telecom and its problems are bigger than ever. This is HAM's key back into the land of value-prop-positive activities. If you plug a broadband antenna into a spectrum analyzer and wave it around, you see that almost all of the action is crammed into the lightly-licensed "trash containment" bands. That's interesting. We probably have the fixed vs flexible allocation wrong. Does 10% of the traffic need 90% of the spectrum? Probably not, now that technology has advanced past fixed-band dumb endpoints. We need to slowly unwind that. 6G was a good start, but the ISM rules mean that we are going to get slightly faster wifi, not some wild and wacky mesh network thing that tries to offer "internet sans video" for $5/mo or whatever.

Re ISM band usefulness: yeah. I grudgingly admit that the propagation characteristics of HF and probably even VHF aren't a great match for the ISM governance model, but at least everywhere I've ever used radios, UHF HAM bands are as dead as a doornail and don't (fine, generally) propagate far enough for small numbers of negligent users to create major problems for large amounts of users. Take some 400mhz UHF and make it ISM. 902-928mhz ISM has a ton of great stuff like LoRa going on, but access to 400mhz bands would be a huge shot in the arm to the practical usability of projects like Meshtastic without significant risks to the general usability of that chunk of spectrum. Another interesting thing about the history of protocol development in ISM bands is how the need to cope with noise/overuse/other forms of spectrum degradation has spurred enormous advances in encoding and signal-processing techniques, quite contrary to the initial expectation of useless garbage dumping zone bands.

Are you saying that the ham bands should be opened up for commercial exploitation? Because if so, I recommend cracking open a radio history book and reading up on the reasons why those bands were intentionally set aside for non-commercial use by the FCC in the very beginning.

Also, HAM is not an acronym.

> Although not an acronym, it is often written as "HAM" in capital letters.

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

See also: the many uses of "HAM" throughout this thread.

Exacly. I've myself been looking around HAMs from networking point of view. I am networker and I would love to get hands on some digital radio.. at least 128Kbps, ideally 1024Kbps stuff where I can slap all the protocol to build network on top of it and then IP. But nope, cannot find anything interesting with decent ranges and cheap enough to buy for tinkering. It seems to be a nische that noone cares to claim.

I know about HSMM, but they are using normal WiFi AP and just slap custom software on top of it and use HAM frequencies. Not bad idea...

They communities are also awfully closed. I tried to find some IRC servers for HAM/network related stuff and no luck really. Found one channel, but they are mostly US people out there (TZ issue for me).

Another issue is that encryption is not allowed on amateur radio, so most internet applications are a no-go.

That's somewhat of an unenforceable policy. Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference.

And there's a ton of perfectly allowable obfuscation techniques that are good enough to secure most comms while still following the letter of the regulation. It's true, this isn't going to replace internet applications, but that's not why hams are doing this to begin with.

> Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference.

Wrong. This is only true in the sense that the bits sent appear to be randomly chosen. Encrypted content sent over radio is still going to adhere to a modulation scheme like FSK, QSK, or something. A simpler analogue is sending coded Morse code. Yes, the dots and dashes appear random, but it's certainly not noise you can very clearly recognize it as Morse. Also, you need to send your callsign in clear text in each transmission. So people will see your call sign and then unintelligible bits after it, and it's easily recognized as encrypted transmissions.

What you're describing is more akin to frequency hopping where RF transmissions are sent out over a broad spectrum. But even then it's still distinguishable from noise unless a very fast hop interval is used.

You're right that you'll probably not get in trouble for it. The FCC really only cares if you're disrupting much more important activities.

There aren't many radios in the higher frequency bands that can be used for networking. That is why people repurpose existing hardware.

BTW, amateurs are limited in what they can use radio for. Replacing existing communication systems is not allowed, efffectively meaning that can't have non-ham users. The systems I know about are for ham-only communication, like linking repeater sites.

Yes, discussing politics or broadcasting music is not allowed over ham radio. Basically all we can do is exchange call signs, locations and details about our signals and stations.

I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).

This is worth a look as works over packet radio.

https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum

Also:

https://discord.gg/Ay7tj7w4

Thanks for info, but I do NOT need network stack. I have my own, I can build my own. I need decent hardware, because I lack knowledge and skills here. Also, its not an interesting stuff to me to play with DSPs and all that stuff really.

What you want to do isn't really what the HAMs want you to be doing anyway.

128-1024 Kbps generally means a ridiculously large bandwidth compared to what most HAM channels allow unless you're really close to your recipient and can use a very wide QAM modulation, in which case your equipment is going to be $$. Your best bet is to stick to the ISM bands, which is where WiFi is anyway.

HF is ~300baud (it matters that it's baud, because "what's a symbol, really") The faster you send information, the more bandwidth it takes, even if it's morse code. A slow, 6-10 word per minute transmission may be 1-3hz wide, but a skilled operator, even with a clean transmitter will take 30+hz to do 60+WPM. i don't remember the exact number but basically any reference will explain it.

so 1024kbps with the sort of technology that exists in the space right now is basically larger than the spectrum available to us in any band in HF. 128kbit transmitted is probably larger than the spectrum available (you can't transmit past the band edges per license, even if it's "splatter") on all of the HF bands, too.

With multi-level modulation, baud is only half of the story, and the other half is SNR. 300 baud at QAM-4096 is 1.2 Mbps, but you have to have extremely good SNR to use QAM-4096.

SNR + bandwidth goes into a calculation of the Shannon limit of a channel.

A colleague of mine (networker and ham radio) engineered a small devices based on LoRa to connect over SSH to network gears consoles during a campus network migration.

There's NPR (new packet radio) on the 430 MHz band, never tried myself but it looks interesting. See for example https://hackaday.io/project/164092-npr-new-packet-radio. It can transport IP and goes up to 500 kbps.

Yeah! I know about NPR.. cool project :)

Yeah, and it turns out that talking to other nerds around the world kind of sucks a lot of the time.

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