I've had a number of "cordial debates" with crusty old hams on this subject. The old guard is still very much hung up on the Old Way. Change scares a lot of the people who learned on expensive vaccum tube systems before the hobby was more broadly accessible. Things like high baudrate, bandwidth negotiation, spread spectrum and encryption scare the pants off of them regardless of the fact that the bands are mostly empty.
"bandwidth negotiation" - HF paths are often unidirectional in the sense that you can interfere with station A without station B being able to hear. You can easily interfere with people you can't hear and autonegotiation mean you're autojamming without being aware of it. Not an issue with "human in the loop" modes. No application layer need for it anyway.
"spread spectrum" - See above, plus raising the noise floor means the death of entire weak signal modes.
"encryption" - Absolutely no need. Would be death of ham radio. Why bother with cheap ham radio licenses if you can just transmit anything you want but encrypted.
"the bands are mostly empty" Buy a better antenna LOL.
Bandwidth negotiation - you can already interfere in the same way without it. This is also true of any radio communication, ELF or EHF
Spread spectrum - yes but has the ability to not significantly interfere with any single other link, can obviously otherwise be kept out of the tiny segment for weak digital or otherwise confined to sub bands
Encryption - this one's my favorite: the hardware is already common, if this argument were true then ham would already be dead. If someone is being abusive they don't give their call anyway and we hunt them with DF the way we always have.
Bands - have you seen 17m to light?
Tldr we have coexisted by being neighborly for over 100 years. New technologies won't add or remove the underlying need for being neighborly. We can therefore play with the new toys if we continue to uphold those principles as we always have.
Bandwidth negotiation - Uh, no. Human in the loop with ears can hear a complaint of interference and stop or adjust. Autonegotiation just turns up the power until the victim can't use the service anymore. RF is not a phone line. Note that we have legal things like RSID mode detection, which is not autonegotiation. Autonegotiation is a great technology for military anti-jamming purposes, not ham radio.
Spread spectrum - The coding gain from SS varies with the bandwidth spread across, so SS over a narrow enough channel... isn't even SS anymore. That said we seem to agree that VHF and up there's plenty of space to channelize and regulate by frequency. What does anyone gain from it other than it interferes with anything else in its channel?
Encryption - You haven't explained why its needed. "I can't talk to you, you can't talk to me" isn't very neighborly or ham radio friendly. So its not needed and only provides downsides. Emcom is difficult enough without everyone not sharing secret keys. What part 97.1 "basis and purpose" section does secretive private transmissions benefit? I mean, if it was useful for some ham radio purpose, sure sounds cool go for it. Encryption is certainly very useful for non-ham-radio purposes, but then by definition it shouldn't be on the ham bands anyway. I admit there are weird exceptions where encryption might be useful, which are already written into regulation, like 97.211 "Space telecommand station" part (b) permits space satellite control uplinks to be encrypted, but only the control signals, which makes sense, so some rando doesn't take over a satellite...
"New technologies won't add or remove the underlying need for being neighborly."
Agreed. As of 2021 nobody has invented a technology for wideband digital to coexist with, well, anything, other than regulating under a channelized system, which seems impossible for international HF.
Your three main arguments seem to boil down to "why can't I jam other people?" whereas my point of view is "why would anyone want to jam other people" so we're probably never going to get along.
There's very little emergency communication that wouldn't benefit from at least cryptographic signatures; in many cases it's also important to be able to communicate private data in emergencies. Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies.
There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too.
The broader problem is that prohibiting new technologies in ham radio until they've been demonstrated to be useful (in your case, demonstrated to be useful in ham radio, despite being prohibited at the time, but most people are less blatantly unreasonable) is a recipe for, at best, chasing the taillights of commercial radio systems, and more commonly total technological stagnation and gradual abandonment.
> Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies.
I can't even imagine what would require encryption ... maybe PII medical traffic under some peculiar artificial scenario and most pessimistic possible HIPPA interpretation?
Now remember, that the stereotype of ham radio emcom is people roll up with no idea how to program their HT to the correct frequencies so they can't even participate. So demanding everyone participate in a GPG WoT or join a Kerberos domain to share encryption keys is an absolute non-starter. If the general public cannot participate without extensive preparation before the event, it means its not part 97 emcom, its just a poor low budget imitation of part 90, its not part 97 operation at all. Why not get GMRS licenses?
Remember there is the perpetual battle in emcom between the people who think "provide emergency communications" applies to Big Brother despite his infinite budget outclassing any possible Ham response, vs the people who think emergency communications is for the people or the general public or even for the individual. Both sides like to denigrate the other side, unfortunately.
So consider I was listening to a rando ham "involuntary storm chaser" report a tornado sighting to the NWS a couple weeks ago. How, in that scenario does encryption help? By making it impossible for the ham to talk to the NWS station because they never shared keys in advance or they shared the 2020 keys and not the 2021 keys? By making it impossible for the general public to hear the tornado report they would be safer not knowing?
Consider something topical, like the hurricane in NO. A rando member of the general ham radio public reports hurricane related flooding. The value encryption provides is making it impossible for the ham radio operator to talk to people to make the report, and encryption also makes it impossible for the general ham radio public to help. "Real ham radio emcom" situation he'd just dial up the repeater and talk to net control and make his report and move on with life. Somehow encryption would help, but ... how?
Edited to add:
> There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too.
I forgot to agree with you on that. Repeater control links and the like.
Maybe "very little use in emergencies" was an overstatement on my part. Clearly there is some important communication in emergencies that doesn't need crypto.
But I think the vast bulk of communications necessary in an emergency is between people who need to talk to their family members to find out where they are, what condition they're in, and what resources they have. That information often needs to remain private between the people who are communicating. Right now it's not mostly sent over ham radio because it can't be. In fact, it isn't transmitted at all, so people die. Advances like Codec 2 dramatically expand our possibilities for communications in emergencies, but mostly for doing new things like that, things we're not already doing.
As another example, suppose that, instead of one person reporting hurricane-related flooding you had a water-level sensor every 100 meters in a rough hexagonal grid, each transmitting a packet every 6 minutes carrying a 16-bit ID and an 8-bit water level. In theory this is an average of about 8 bits per second per square kilometer, so it wouldn't have to cause much interference or use much average power, but it's hard to get it to work under Part 15 rules because Part 15 doesn't allow you to average your power usage over 6 minutes, so you pretty much have to build a mesh network to get adequate range at the allowed power levels. You probably need to cryptographically sign the packets for the system to be reasonably reliable. (They don't need to be secret, but you need to be able to distinguish legitimate reports from griefers trying to divert emergency resources when there's no emergency.)
Nowadays you might be able to do that with LoRa. But you could have done it 20 years ago on the amateur bands --- except that it's illegal. So again hams are chasing the taillights of commercial radio, the opposite of how it's supposed to be.
In an emergency, I can’t imagine having an amateur radio link available, having a need to comm with family, and deciding not to because the connection was unencrypted and unsigned.
Airplanes are controlled by in the clear, unsigned radio comms every day. I don’t see why emergency comms over AR is a more compelling case for a secure link.
The hypothetical person I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28361769 could certainly imagine deciding to not provide information her family needed to know for that reason, or not to attempt to meet up with them, because she is in a distinctly different position from an aircraft! And real emergencies are full of people in situations like hers, and worse.
That specific message is ill-advised. A significant portion of that message could be transmitted safely and would be way better than "Nah, not going to key the mic at all unless it's encrypted..."
"Katie and Uncles Bob and Jim are all moving from X to Y. We're armed only with our AR-15s and have plenty of ammo. We had to leave behind a few other things at the house, but we're moving safely and expected at Y before dark."
If the family knows they don't own any AR-15s and don't have any uncles named Bob or Jim, the message is received (or enough of it to be practically useful without being an unneeded forfeiture of OpSec).
Probably I'd think Katie was off her skull, or someone who didn't know us was trying to trick me into going to Y. If I did think Katie was just lying, I'd wonder if she was lying about Y too.
I've listened to several police radios with my SDR - "old male with [medical condition] at [person's address]" isn't uncommon.
Some research - paramedics are likely covered under HIPAA (if they work for a healthcare entity that provides ambulance services), I don't believe police or the fire department would be covered.
The things I'm thinking most need to be protected are more like "unaccompanied 16-year-old girl [name] at [station's address] plans to cross the recently burned area to rendezvous with [family member's name] at [rendezvous point]. She was able to get the cash savings out of the safe before the house burned, but couldn't get the gun safe open."
After Katrina, dead bodies with gunshot wounds rotted in the streets for weeks, uninvestigated. Human jackals aren't common but when they sense impunity they do make their presence known.
There is a lot of unnecessary information in your hypothetical message. What, beyond "[name] plans to rendezvous with [family member's name] at [rendezvous point] (about [time])" needs to be conveyed? Suddenly it's a very different message.
Well, if someone is listening to the girl's voice on the radio, they can guess her age. If her voice isn't on the radio, you as a family member have no reason to believe that it's really her. You need to plan out the route to the rendezvous point so that you know where to look for her if she doesn't make it, and she knows where she should go if you don't show up. If you (the family member) are trying to find a place to stay, or a way to buy gas, it may be crucial information to you that she has money, because that information may keep you from attempting trips into dangerous areas to get it; likewise, that she is unarmed, because, if you feel that you need to be armed, you know that her arrival will not provide that, and you still need to keep considering alternative options, like dropping half a grand at the pawn shop before they sell out. When you are having the discussion with her and discussing alternative possible plans for meeting up, the fact that she is unarmed is relevant to choosing among the alternative plans. You probably also need to discuss with her what things to take along on the trip; maybe she hasn't thought about the need for N95 masks in the recently burned zone, but maybe she can get one from someone at the station.
So really this kind of rendezvous arrangement benefits enormously from being able to discuss such plans at some length, but it would be terrible if random strangers were listening in. Without cellphones, you have to discuss this stuff in advance in order to successfully meet up with people; you can't pop off an SMS to ask them where they are or let them know you're running late.
While I tend to agree more with your answers than edrxty baseless claims about spread spectrum and unrealistic bandwidth negotiation (doesn't work with hidden nodes), it's important to note that there are alternative models to the ham spectrum management model. Namely:
ISM short range device (SRD) - the rules are very simple: transmit anything you want, no more than xxx watts, tx duty cycle no more than 1%. IMHO, this can be scaled to ham frequencies (ex: 0.01% duty cycle).
ISM 2.4 GHz - the rules are (basically) transmit only if no other signal is detected above threshold (-75dBm). Exponential back off otherwise. This is also called the Aloha model. This model also works most of the time, although its applicability to HF propagation is unclear.
The history of HF packet radio going back almost 40 years now, shows it stomps things pretty bad. RTTY and PSK31 ops simply cannot operate nearby HF packet channels.
Aloha DOES work really well for decades on "toll quality VHF FM" strong high SNR local packet radio LANs.
Everyone's gotta be able to hear everyone or else channel thruput drops to about zero. Easy on a city wide VHF FM packet lan, impossible on HF.
Reminds me of thin net ethernet in the 80s (thicknet also, LOL). One babbling transmitter and the whole LAN is down for everyone.
I feel like you're taking an extremely narrow view of use cases, but I apologize I'm coming off as antagonistic, it's not my intent. I really just want people to open up to expanding what's possible in our bands.
The ham bands are for experimentation. Currently experimentation is essentially banned as the most of the biggest recent innovations are against the rules and the old guard wants to ban the rest (see FT8/WSPR).
Negotiation - there are plenty of bandwidth negotiation strategies, not just scream louder. You can listen and avoid areas where people are obviously talking, it doesn't take human level intellect to detect signal.
SS - interference avoidance is the biggest use case. There are a number of different techniques here, not just noise vomit, chirp being one of the more interesting.
Encryption - Obviously nobody in their right mind is going to sit there and scream about a tornado on an encrypted channel or try to coordinate encrypted emcom. Simplifying ham to the point where anyone can use it is called the FRS band and as such we don't need to worry about that here. There are plenty of useful cases though, remote command/telemetry being only one of many. Experimenting with encrypted modes/algorithms/hardware is the most relevant, as well as just wanting the ability to have a private conversation from time to time. Lets also not forget that it's legal in Europe and they have yet to meet a firey ham demise.
2021 - and with these rules there never will be one. Private industry has no interest but spectrum is finite and human needs are infinite. Developing such a mode would be extremely useful if the FCC ever gets around to increasing the size and number of ISM bands as more applications arise.
I'd be willing to meet you with this: the HF bands are touchy, I fully agree there's a legitimate interest in keeping things the way they are >=20m. I think the wild west should really open up at VHF and above however. There just isn't any use save one repeater out of hundreds every few hours in a sea of blue waterfall. Even if encryption/SS/WB/whatever was legalized on 2m/70cm and WILDLY abused (it wouldn't be) I don't think anyone would really even notice.
I know quite a few people who would rather use free encrypted ham radio (if it existed) than pay a yearly fee for business band. And if it was encrypted, how would the FCC ever notice (or get alerted by other noticing hams) that it was getting used for business?
At least as I propose it and it's implemented in the respective specs, the clear-text ID requirement would still stay. If you weren't ID-ing then it would be just like any other enforcement action.
As it stands, there are enough digital modes that one could reasonably operate with encrypted business band radios and nobody would know as one has to assume that any mode they can't receive is yet another one they don't have a radio for yet there isn't widespread abuse. Similarly there are countries where it's legal and it's not a problem.
The advantage of business band isn't the encryption, it's being able to have a guaranteed frequency to yourself. On the ham bands you'd have to train all your users how hop around if someone started using the frequency.
as someone who is not familiar with this world (but takes deep interest in (n)etiquette), would someone be willing to do a quick breakdown of ham netiquette, "being neighborly", fears of encryption and how abuse is managed in the ham world?
i ask because maybe there are some learnings and lessons there that could apply to internet policy today.
it sounds like certain things, like anonymity, are banned? there's some sort of community policing? i'm super curious.
Only been a Ham for 2 years, but the etiquette I've observed falls along the lines of "don't do things that make it hard for other people to have fun". Like checking to see if the frequency is in use before sending, and not blasting out a wide signal when a narrow one will do. Respecting band plans, both formal and informal, especially digital people sticking around established watering holes and not splattering the CW areas. Don't tune up (sending a tone to configure your antenna tuner) on someone's frequency.
Another part is "let people do their thing". Like if someone's in a special activity and managing a pileup (lots of people trying to call), just give them the exchange and move on.
Due to the asymmetric nature of propagation, stuff happens. You may not hear anyone using the frequency but they hear you just fine. If band conditions take a turn for the worse, politely tell the other person you're losing them and thanks for the conversation.
Anonymity is banned; FCC part 97 says you have to use your call sign every 10 minutes and at the end of the transmission.
Ultimately the FCC is responsible for enforcing these but of course don't have the time. People can report people to the FCC and they _may_ open an investigation depending on that nature of it. There's also the ARRL volunteer monitoring program where participants listen on the air and, through the program, send out notices of good and bad behavior, optionally referring cases to the FCC. It's usually stuff like "guy constantly being a jackass on a repeater and ruining it for others", with a good bit of "sending outside your privileges" and "not identifying yourself".
That said we've all accidentally sent outside our privileges, we've all stepped on people. It happens.
As amateurs we know that if we don't do a good job of operating we'll lose the spectrum, so it's usually not a huge problem. There are jerks, there are also people that don't know they're being jerks.
As for community policing the FCC itself polices some, and the official observer program has been replaced by the volunteer monitor program which is mostly the same thing.
I think you can assume much like on the net, there's at least ten times as many lurkers listening as there are people talking.
Back in '28, 1928, the radio amateur's code was written which was a pretty good attempt at letting people talk as much as possible while eliminating ore reducing flame wars over the air.
My guess is over the last century the more authoritarian govts banned it, and the free-er countries have lots of people who like to collect contacts and you're not going to get a collectible QSL card in the mail from a guy if over the air you call him a filthy (insert appropriate political slur here) so naturally people tended to not talk about politics, because gotta collect QSL cards or contest points or whatever.
On the radio, the quality of your station and antenna and your skills determine how many people you can talk to, so competition, so people are more civil to each other. On the internet, unfortunately everyone "hears" everyone, so there's no gain from not being a jerk, so there's lots of jerks.
I don't have a lot of time, but this was an interesting question. If you message me I'll dig up references. There are nuances and exceptions to almost everything I list below.
The radio spectrum is a scarce resource. Two of the main reasons amateur radio users are given access to the spectrum is to help with disaster recovery and to advance the art and science of radio.
Callsigns are public - you can look up anyone's to see who they are.
You're required to give your callsign at the end of your transmission, and every 10 minutes.
There are some limitations on content. No music, no profanity, no commercial uses, and no encryption.
netiquette varies based on what you are doing. In general, shorter range bands have better sound quality and are more casual. Longer range has worse sound quality (or no sound like morse or ft8).
If you're on one of the shorter range bands (e.g. 70cm) you'll often find people who are keeping in touch with friends, or just looking for someone to talk to.
On the longer range, you'll run into stuff like contests - all the other person wants to know is who you are, and where you are. They're trying to see either how many contacts they can make in a period of time or how far away they're able to make contacts.
There are "formal traffic" nets - which pass messages. Local nets will route traffic they can't deliver to regional nets, and then back down to local nets. Usually they just pass practice traffic around - until a disaster occurs and they are needed. More info https://www.arrl.org/nts-manual
Edit: I forgot about you abuse question. Hams tend to police their own or will work with the FCC to report people misusing the airwaves. The practice version of this is called "fox hunting" - where someone places a transmitter and you try to find it.
Most hams care about keeping the hobby alive. If they find someone who's broadcasting with too much power or without a license usually they'll try to work with that person to correct the behavior. If that doesn't work, they'll often work with the FCC.
I am not unamenable with the crusty old hams in some regards. Part of the charm of these little slices of the spectrum are that they are are, in some part, the only place where you can meaningfully interact with legacy analog radio technology and specifications. There are lots of places you can muck about with digital radio, shiny new specs, mesh networks, etc etc. But if you want to build your own antenna, grab a super low powered transmitter and bounce an analog signal off the atmo to talk with a person halfway around the globe, Ham radio is where to be. It's reasonable for people to desire to protect that.
Those "crusty old hams" include people who designed VLSI. Designed modern computer languages. Wrote the RFCs in IETF on how to do things.
I think you seriously mis-understand how much the "crusty old hams" know, and do, in the modern Internet: They helped build it. Not only the SL/IP and AX25 part, a lot more than just that.
Read up on KA9Q. Top hit in wikipedia is good. Now, look at the person. The wikipedia link is good. Now, go look at the company he works at, or used to. Now, open your cellphone, and look at the logo on the chipsets...
Old guard. VLM is in the right. As a kid i was a terror. Killowatts of power. Irressistable! But we decided, ricky and i, to stick to fm. I do not believe we were loved.
Radio engineering doesn't mesh well with a "move fast and break things" world view. Often the things you're breaking mean other people are losing out.
The world of HF is very different from higher bands because of propagation and low band width (especially for hams). With a well tuned antenna even a relatively modest transmitter can DX hundreds or thousands of miles.
* The low band width on HF with a high noise floor makes high symbol rates pointless throughout the band. You'd need so much FEC there'd be little benefit from the higher rates. A symbol rate that might work fine for contacts a hundred miles apart will just be noise for contacts five hundred miles away. Because of DXing on HF it's entirely possible to have your transmissions picked up across the hemisphere.
* Likewise symbol rate negotiation is problematic because of propagation. Transmissions aren't point to point links even if you're addressing a particular station. Like the point above symbol rates that work for two stations will not necessarily work for all stations that will receive the signal. That's just more noise for them and an inability to use that part of the band.
* The band width for hams on HF is too small for spread spectrum comms to be useful. Yet again transmissions that work in some conditions won't necessarily work everywhere the transmission reaches.
* Quick, what's the difference between an encrypted signal with a long duty cycle and noise? NOTHING. Every aspect of ham radio comes back down to being good stewards of a scarce resource and sharing it.
If you blast your headphones you're not going to affect me living next door. You can listen to whatever you want at any volume. If you blow out your ear drums that's your business. If you instead blast your big-ass stereo speakers now you're affecting me next door. You've got a right to blast out your eardrums, not mine.
Radio, like the air between our houses, is a shared medium. There's bands where if you want to blast signals or play around with different modes, I'll never detect it even living next door. There's also bands, like HF, where you can affect my use of the band even on opposite sides of the state. You don't have more of a right to hams bands than I do. If you want to blast high powered wide bandwidth transmissions, petition the FCC to buy a license to some spectrum (good luck).
The issue isn't graybeard hams being afraid of new fangled technology. While those do exist the much bigger issue is the whole of the HF band (and all uses of it) could fit in a single WiFi channel with room to spare. Of that tiny space hams have privileges on a tiny subsection. To even use that tiny subsection requires advanced licensing and a fair investment in equipment. Any individual user wants to put that time/money investment to use but so does every other user. It's hard to share a sliver of bandwidth if there's a couple assholes essentially blasting out noise all across that sliver of spectrum.
My arguments tend to sum to the fact that the ham radio bands are provided as an experimental space. I'm not advocating for anything that hasn't been tried before, in particular encryption is legal in other countries and hasn't caused any issues for them.
While I'm sure you've got links to regulations allowing for hams to use encryption, they're going to fall into two categories: emergency communications and preventing unauthorized access to remote automated stations (satellites etc). So encryption doesn't cause problems because it's scope is extremely limited.
As for your suggestions for things in the HF bands, they simply do not make sense for the reasons I described. In the blasting stereo analogy, HF is like a stereo blasting you can hear across the country. There's very little bandwidth to even negotiate between stations and conditions vary so much that you'd need to change the symbol rate constantly. Hams settled on CW and slow digital modes on HF because that's what tends to works best on HF. They don't need wide bandwidth and they resist multipath interference.
Apologies, I was trying to point at a mentality rather than an age but obviously the wording could be better. There are plenty of 20-30 somethings that hold the same beliefs and plenty of older ones that agree with me. The amateur radio community is a rather complicated landscape and that bears acknowledging.
