I would love to live in a world where the FCC could update outdated regulation within 50 days in response to a random internet comment to a commissioner...but that's not this universe.
The parent comment doesn't say they think they're solely responsible, but just that it might have helped. Given the positive response from the commissioner who posted the AMA that they already supported it, I don't think it's unreasonable that it might have been a bit of a reminder or motivation to prioritize it a bit more.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know what kind of throughput we could expect on a simplex 2.8/2.5khz carrier? Assuming something like -75dbm SNR. I'm not familiar with anything modern that does bandwidths that small.
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).
This is a really good thing, but for non-radio people it can be confusing.
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.
> A baud is a raw bit in a digital data stream, it can either be data or part of the channel protocol.
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.
You are absolutely correct. My experience, which is by no means exhaustive, is that "symbol rate" vs "baud rate" vs "bit rate" and "protocol encoding" vs "data bits" are topics that go deep but can quickly overwhelm someone thinking about this stuff for the first time (or at least nearly so). So to reassure you I was trying to be more "accessible" than "precise" in my writing here. And yes, I often miss the mark and go too far one way or the other.
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 :-).
Yes. Suppose you're communicating with signal flags. You have a black flag and a white flag, and assign them to represent 0 and 1 respectively. If you can change flags once per second, you have a bit rate of 1 bit per second, and the baud rate is also 1 (1 flag change per second).
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.
There are lots of ways, one possible way being an indication in the beacon package via APRS or WSPR that a new image is available. "SSTV" is a protocol for sending "Slow Scan TeleVision" images over the air on 10 meters which is 28 MHz which has decent propagation. Generally such transmissions are energy intensive and might blip on then blip off given a solar charged power source. Most Amateur balloons just tell you where they happen to be at the moment via GPS co-ordinates.
> But certainly HF stuff, especially below 30MHz, is like any old wire will do
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?
Heh, the answer is sort of. Your receiver likely already has a filter network to "ground out" any coupled electro magnetic interference (EMI) coming from those wires. All conductors "receive" to a greater or lesser degree and so people building things that connect to wires have to account for that and plan for it. So using your speaker wires directly would probably not work very well because of filter networks in the receiver.
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).
You still have to point it at things. I had the worst possible plot for my HF antenna which meant the lobes were in the wrong place for about 5 years :(
Be careful not to confuse antenna design with "needing to point". :-) There are antennas with pretty circular gain in azimuth but asymmetrical gain in altitude. I have a 08-ANT-0861 from MP Antenna that pretty much looks every which way. And I can recommend it for people who need "one" antenna for a bunch of different experiments.
Quick look of the datasheet suggests that's specified for three bands around UHF, VHF base stations. I mean I'm sure it'll sort of work outside those bands on receive to some varying degrees of success but on transmit, it's going to be a terrible terrible mismatch.
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".
Fair enough, I've got an Agilent 8753A (3GHz version) that I can do an S11 sweep on. It that counts as a "proper" VNA :-) Drop me an email (contact is in my profile) if you would like me to send you a copy of it. (note it won't be right away as the bench is covered some different equipment at the moment)
That is about as proper as VNAs get :). Would be interested in that but will not share my email here as this is my trash account. If you can attach the sweep on imgur I can look at it there.
> A few commenters at the time of the NPRM opposed any rule change, arguing that the existing rules should be retained in order to protect access to amateur bands by Morse code and other narrowband transmissions.
I guess there's gatekeeping NIMBYs in the amateur radio bands as well!
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.
Wi-Fi™ was never intended to describe anything. It is a commercial trademark brand, chosen to sound good and be easy to recognise. There's a Wi-Fi™ logo too.
In a similar way, ThunderBolt™ links don't use thunder, or bolts.
The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual, 3rd edition, section 1.1 explains the term:
> 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].
And within those communities there will be assholes who are better than you too who are gatekeeping the sublevels.
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 know next to nothing about radio, can someone tell me why a baud rate limit put in to begin with? Is there a technical reason for it like causing interference or something?
> Is there a technical reason for it like causing interference or something?
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.
When the limit was put in place, we didn't know that symbol rate and baud rate could be different. A lot of these discoveries really came into their own during the 90's and enabled far more data transmission than previously imagined.
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.
Plenty of stories of old hams that became dysphagic following a stroke, but could still chat with fellow hams using Morse - whether using simple finger movements in the hospital or months later on-the-air.
Morse sounds like a useful thing, really. There aren't many digital encodings that can be done by hand and still remain readable in high-noise conditions.
Oh it's useful and if you want to use it that doesn't change. However a number of us are interested in the digital and experimental side of ham radio, for that morse code doesn't really offer anything and it's a non-trivial hurdle to cross.
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.
Exactly this. Current ham regs in the digital modes really, really limits what you can do, and keeps it in the dark ages compared to what goes on in 900mhz and 2.4ghz with unlicensed devices. We need to get back to where having a ham license means you can do cutting edge things!
Give it a rest. No one holds you back in amateur radio and if the comments of old farts bothers you, perhaps you need to evaluate what prompts them to tell you that.
As long as you are Part 97 compliant, what exactly is your problem?
it has a number of pretty big downsides. for example, it's not a hamming code and isn't self synchronizing. it's not horrible, but it is missing a lot of the properties you would want from a modern digital code.
That's a really bad way of looking at it. From a theoretical perspective yes but it's more useful if you think of it is a language. If you do it for a bit you'll get it and you tend to pick it up like another conversation method with different sounds that's all. It's not dots and dashes, it's musical phrases that you learn. And from that, like conversation, you fill in gaps and recognise words automatically.
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.
What is a "stupid lightbulb" in this case? is that some kind of "ham operator" parlance, or are you only referring to using Morse code and a flashlight/light source?
You still need equipment to transmit/receive radio...
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.
The bandwidth of a CW signal depends very much on the bandwidth of the modulation, eg the faster the keying speed, the wider the bandwidth.
"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.
> The sidebands of morse code carry no information and are incidental.
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.
Baud rate and symbol rate often refer to the same thing, especially in the context of digital communications. However, they don't necessarily equate to the bit rate. In the digital realm, we're familiar with the concept of 1's and 0's, which represent binary states. When we transmit a single bit, it can be visualized as a digital line being high (for 1) or low (for 0). The rate at which this line transitions from one state to another is called the baud rate or symbol rate.
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.
Oops, yeah and it's not quite my domain of expertise. In fact, that's the big draw for me: Amateur radio has been amazing for filling in knowledge gaps of low level electrical engineering details. it takes things way past the simple CPU/system models from university CS class and the Arduino DC logic hobby projects. The educational potential is really top notch.
if there are two possible symbols in your communication medium that you switch between, bit rate is baud rate (with the two symbols being 0 and 1). If you have more symbols, then baud/symbol rate increases will correspond to greater bitrates increases by a factor.
It has nothing to do with amateur radio operators being conservative. The rules were what they were, and amateurs experimented within those rules such as modifying fax modems for use on HF.
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.
Two reasons, avoid interference because the benchmark was a generously wide single-sideband transmission, and to avoid creating the opportunity for competition with commercial services.
When these rules were adopted, a phone call to Europe was $3 per minute and a Telex as $10 for thirty words.
The spectrum is a limited resource. Rate limits restrict the amount of spectrum one occupies, leaving more of it for use by other operators.
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.
In nearly all cases, the lower the baud rate, the lower the bandwidth. You can come up with sufficiently pathological cases but indeed it’s the bandwidth that should be limited.
EDIT: you should look at the shanon-Hartley limit. The bandwidth is proportional to the symbol rate.
> In nearly all cases, the lower the baud rate, the lower the bandwidth. You can come up with sufficiently pathological cases but indeed it’s the bandwidth that should be limited.
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.
Pre-single-sideband suppressed carrier systems used an AM carrier, so there really were two audio tones. It's also possible to send FSK over FM, which was often done on VHF where there's more room.
Before everything went digital, this sort of thing tended to involve a chain of analog processing stages.
If removing an archaic restriction is "bolstering amateur radio" then what does the FCC call the recently imposed $35 fees for new or modified ham licenses that up to now had been one of the few government courtesies left?
I believe they call it is following this law [1] that requires them to do so, which was passed by the House and Senate in 2018 and signed by President Trump.
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.
I’m not ignorant of why this happened, although a bit bitter nonetheless. I can only hope that the FCC can respond by becoming more of an enforcer and more mindful that we hams (about a million of us, iirc) are now paying for their services.
Well, other FCC users are commercial users of the airwaves. Wouldn’t it make sense that their fees would cover the costs of “ongoing support” of the citizenry’s non-commercial use of radio spectrum? It’s not like they have to build roads or buildings to make this happen - it’s just some rulemaking and a database.
If you’re not aware, hams have for many years received paltry (at best) support from the FCC in terms of any enforcement.
It could have been worse, unless the fee has changed since it was imposed around 2002 or so, fresh Norwegian hams need to cough up NOK2000/USD180 or so.
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...
Not sure about other countries but in Holland it had a clear reason. The old socialist-centric government of the 80s/early 90s viewed the radio spectrum as infrastructure similar to the road network. This meant that in their view their main task was policing the airwaves. Policing was omnipresent, and they would take action on every infraction even ones where radio spectrum that wasn't actually in use was used by unauthorized parties. The radio amateurs were simply one of the many right holders and treated as such. We paid a pretty reasonable fee but were respected in turn.
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.
Wow... I started reading the FCC proposal[1], and learned of a new Ham Band, the 630 Meter band.[2] Unfortunately, I live near a 138KV power line, so I likely can't use it.
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.
“...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.”
I've never heard of anyone having a 630m permit denied due to that. I've never heard of anyone having a 630m permit denied, at all. There is some remote region of Alaska with a power restriction.
> 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
Let's be honest this was probably part of a lobbying effort by some big tech company. The wheels of government don't roll unless they're greased with gold.
I think the proposed rule to replace the baud limits in VHF and above will make more of a difference.
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.
The rule is technically a problem for meteor scatter in 10m. The short duration of the channel favors high baud rates and multi-path isn't a significant issue there.
I hope any hams here also commented on the recent proposal to allow commodities traders to encroach on ham spectrum to gain a few milliseconds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37283776
Great news. I’d like to see them take down some restrictions for ISM bands experimentation as well. So many consumer devices operate at 2.4 GHz or 900 MHz so there’s a lot to be done there.FWIW I wouldn’t feel bad about doing very low power short term experiments on those bands, but I wouldnt publish anything on it based on what I understand of the current regulations.
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.
> I would also love to see some (not all) uhf band allow encryption.
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):
I’m sorry but encryption is not required to test your antenna setup and get reading of your output power from another station.
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.
what about allowing authentication, rather than encryption? like, let people send MAC-protected checksums and signatures to make plaintext verifiable.
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.
> what about allowing authentication, rather than encryption? like, let people send MAC-protected checksums and signatures to make plaintext verifiable.
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.
> You miss the point, it is not about communication as in having a conversation.
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.
> This would also make internet relay possible and legal in uhf.
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.
I want to agree with encryption but I think we’d see tunneling unapproved use though approved use. I don’t use my license enough to know is cryptographic signing is kosher but if it’s not that would be cool.
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.
Signatures on a cleartext transmission should be okay, I think. The FCC prohibits obscured meaning and as long as the encoding scheme is published (and you're courteous and follow the band plan) then I don't think there's anything forbidding making traffic un-forgeable with cryptography.
Yeah that's why I suggest a small subset of the UHF spectrum - it's naturally range limited to your local repeaters and it has the room to carve some space for whatever encrypted traffic is flowing.
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.
If you are transmitting an encrypted signal and I am not the recipient, I just see it as noise. There's no way for me to know its not noise. Since I have no insight into the transmission other than it's noise I don't have any idea when I get to use the shared medium you decided you wanted to monopolize.
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.
They actually never explicitly say no encryption. I can't find the section right now but it says something like "no obstructing the purpose of your transmission". So theoretically you could add a header to every packet that says "purpose: testing hardware" and you'd be fine. It's only other groups, not the FCC, who have interpreted that to mean no encryption.
> I can't find the section right now but it says something like "no obstructing the purpose of your transmission". So theoretically you could add a header to every packet that says "purpose: testing hardware" and you'd be fine.
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.
I'm not an experienced ham; I only have my technician license.
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.
Your messages are cleartext, can be forged, and your password can be trivially grabbed across just a few logins.
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.
I have to see anyone take things seriously enough to sign their messages. We could easily assert a public key then send a chirp at the end that signs the transmission we just made, with our corresponding private key, for folks to verify.
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.
Yeah, it would be nice to see some protocols to do just that, implement authentication over cleartext messages in a way that's compatible with the rules, and then wedge that under some useful apps.
For a non ham radio guy, can any such change affect some use case like when some digital widespread issue, an analog communication for short message or even ham call can help but now cannot. I read the message about Morse code but they have not explained the consequences
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!
What interests you? Talking around the world? Communicating more in your immediate area? Socially, or for emergencies? Voice, Morse code or some digital modes?
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.
Here's my problem: it's all interesting. Ideally I'd like to hack around with packet radio. I've got a small cabin in the rural northeastern US, and would ideally like to hack on something with practical benefits in that setting. I'm pretty open to suggestions :)
>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?
The first thing is to get your Techician license. Pandemic means that there are now online tests. That allows you to transmit on VHF/UHF. Get a handheld radio. You can also try out packet data.
If you want to do HF and long distances, then get your General license and HF radio.
How far away (as the crow flies) is the cabin? Check out APRS. I use it to message me wife when I'm backpacking. I regularly see messages from 200 miles away on my hand held, without Internet. I'm in Montana, so mountain top repeaters help. I don't know how is without them.
There is someone near me that uses APRS to beacon out the state of their solar/batteries at a remote cabin.
Get an RTL-SDR kit with filters and antennas and start listening. No license needed. Gqrx (and I'm assuming other software) has labels on the frequencies so you can look around the amateur radio bands.
Holy shit, the title undersells that. The 300 baud limitation made digital radio basically useless for anything other than old geezers trying to fill their logbook with DXs.
This is fucking great, and I hope it goes through.
This is very exciting, and hopefully can be a big aspect in getting off-the-shelf 100W radios capable of doing I/Q out over USB instead of the stupid audio interfaces we're stuck with today.
I was expecting restrictions like encryption to be removed so you could use modern network protocols.
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.
> It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it.
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). :)
> 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.
That position is inconsistent with both the law and the history of amateur radio. There is no general field of use restrictions (outside of music and broadcast which themselves were originally allowed but eventually restricted to restrict competition for commercial broadcasters). Amateur radio is open to qualified persons of any age who are interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest.
You can't because (among other reasons) the responses may contain naughty words-- you can't even read HN or most amateur radio forums over amateur radio without violating the regulations. You also cannot use standard software over the radio due to the mandatory encryption (or inability to do authentication without encryption) which is ubiquitious in software designed for use on public networks.
>It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it.
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.
> On the internet trasitioning from a hobby website to a commercial one is seamless.
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.
> 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.
People who think its a dead end and that it cannot live up to the utility of the internet are not dreamers. They are content with the way things are to the point that they are not capable of seeing what it could truly be capable of.
The Internet has the bandwidth to accomodate private channels. You don't know what you're talking about. There are no security vulnerabilities where there are no secrets. That's the point of ham.
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.
Pedantically, use of amateur radio as a broadcast medium is prohibited in FCC land except for special exceptions like beacon stations. This, like the wholesale prohibition on music is also antiquated in my view -- already commercial broadcast radio is dying because of streaming. The public interest would be maximized by allowing a degree of non-commercial broadcast and music usage over amateur bands, subject to restrictions.
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.
Obscuring a message, by itself, does nothing to prevent MitM attacks. If you're worried about message integrity on the amateur bands, the rules do nothing to prevent the use of digital signatures.
Agreed-- at least relaxing the restriction for UHF/SHF signals on a "secondary usage" basis (traffic must yield to plaintext). Potentially with with reduced power (say 100w) or minimum directionality, but I think a 'secondary usage' would be sufficient. Without doing so virtually all non-HF experimentation will continue to be deflected onto the ISM bands and we will lose our allocations through disuse.
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.
As to cell phone service being ubiquitous - there's a lot of farmers in places without ubiquitous cell service, and those farmers do need to communicate. Some use CB, and a lot use business band (licensed) or GMRS (without getting a license usually, and IME using more power than legal). If ham radio was an option (by allowing encryption) they'd be using it.
Allowing encryption wouldn't make ham radio any more an option than their GMRS usage. To the extent that someone in far off nowhere might make some rule violating usage (e.g. using it commercially) it's moot: they already can. They're at risk of getting caught and getting a forfeiture order and fine, but they are regardless of if they use encryption or not.
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).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394599