[HN Gopher] FCC wants to bolster amateur radio
___________________________________________________________________
FCC wants to bolster amateur radio
Author : Stratoscope
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-10-28 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.radioworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.radioworld.com)
| vvanders wrote:
| Finally.
|
| This has always felt backwards and I hope it leads to some more
| interesting modes across the bands.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| This is great news.
|
| 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.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _services like winlink and digital messaging are hampered
| without encryption and become unsafe for the operators_
|
| How so?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.
| skullone wrote:
| I don't think scammers will be listening in on shortwave to
| grab names or an address during an emergency :p
| baz00 wrote:
| Have you been to a hamfest recently? Do you want half the
| participants getting your details?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Security through obscurity is no security at all. SDRs
| that will record everything across a nice swath of
| frequency are $20.
| Forgotthepass8 wrote:
| +those fantastic websdr sites will have it captured
| kwk1 wrote:
| > Your messages are cleartext, can be forged
|
| 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.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| 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.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| That's my understanding as well.
|
| But I'd also bet a dollar that someone fails to understand
| the difference and gets their undies in a massive twist
| about it.
| twiclo wrote:
| 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.
| emptybits wrote:
| > 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_.
|
| Section 97: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/s
| ubchapter-D...
| chriscjcj wrote:
| I'm not an experienced ham; I only have my technician
| license.
|
| Throughout the 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.
| ozim wrote:
| 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.
| lostapathy wrote:
| > 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.
| sterlind wrote:
| 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.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-
| D...
| vvoid wrote:
| My fear would be Helium and rightwing extremist groups.
| Currently happy to have the encrypted P25 users on the wrong
| side of part 97.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Do people operate pirate/unlicensed P25 nets? Seems like
| that's the kind of thing hams would like to foxhunt.
| vvoid wrote:
| Judging by amateur radio subreddits, there is significant
| crossover interest in this among the prepper and mutual aid
| community.
|
| Rhetorically speaking, what does one do with the fox once
| it's caught? In particular one experimenting with TAK?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Don't let your fear of boogeymen impact your opinions on how
| we use spectrum
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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):
|
| * 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20386875
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACTOR
|
| * https://www.bwsailing.com/bw/ssb-email-and-weather-made-
| easy...
|
| * https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/PACTOR_IV
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > 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.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I like to think that I helped with this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394599
| stouset wrote:
| Given a lack of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to think
| that too.
|
| Great work!
| roflchoppa wrote:
| Dude Jessica has been killing it lately.
| valianteffort wrote:
| 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.
| altairprime wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38052869
| striking wrote:
| "big tech" is currently lobbying to repurpose amateur radio
| frequencies for themselves (like for HFT
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/ham-radio-
| enthusiast...) so I'm not sure where you're getting this
| from.
| tass wrote:
| The ARRL has been pushing this for a while:
|
| https://www.arrl.org/news/congresswoman-lesko-
| reintroduces-b...
|
| It's kind of unfortunate this type of decision requires
| Congress.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Other changes under Jessica Rosenworcel that show she is
| "killing it"?
| antonyt wrote:
| Not OP, but I imagine referring to
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/fcc-moves-
| ahead-...
| donatj wrote:
| 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?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I think to limit the amount of spectrum used by any one
| signal... prevent bandwidth hogs.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Uh oh. Looks like the Stack Overflow mods among us closed your
| question as off topic.
| donatj wrote:
| I reworded it to be more clear what I was asking and it
| turned around. It was fair.
| gaze wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| > 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.
| Steltek wrote:
| 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.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Do you mean _bit_ rate and baud rate can be different? My
| understanding is that baud rate and symbol rate are the same
| thing.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| Steltek wrote:
| Okay, I was pretty sure I had it right the first time but
| my confidence is rather low since it's been a while since
| I read up on it.
| Steltek wrote:
| 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.
| mal10c wrote:
| 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.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| 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.
| vvanders wrote:
| 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.
| lostapathy wrote:
| 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!
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| 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.
| baz00 wrote:
| 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.
| subhro wrote:
| Oh it's crazy useful. You can communicate with a stupid
| lightbulb. It might save your life some day.
| kortilla wrote:
| Extremely unlikely. Learning to start a fire without
| matches or a lighter is far more likely to be life
| saving.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| 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?
| lebuffon wrote:
| It means you can transmit Morse code by blinking a light
| on and off in the correct manner.
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| What you're saying is very wrong.
|
| 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.
| Crunchified wrote:
| 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.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| > _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!
| EGG_CREAM wrote:
| HAM here, can confirm. If a community exists, there will be
| pointless gatekeeping of that community, lol.
| baz00 wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| genmud wrote:
| I thought the encryption restriction was only for analog radio,
| not digital?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| No. You can encode data digitally, per a specification, but
| you can't encode it.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against
| the hobbyist spirit of it.
|
| Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial
| and be able to observe the traffic. That would die with
| widespread encryption.
|
| Your insulting of people who try to maintain radios for
| emergencies is unnecessary, too.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You conflate unicast web traffic with city-wide and world-
| wide broadcast. It's a different medium.
| nullc wrote:
| 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 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| aliljet wrote:
| This is so damn cool. How do you discover services in this
| environment (e.g., how does that weather balloon announce it
| has an image?)
| baz00 wrote:
| Amateur radio is mostly lots of pointing stuff at things and
| waiting.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| not sure you what you're thinking of, but most amateur
| radio can be done with an omni antenna.
| constantly wrote:
| I haven't done much radio aside from basic SDR stuff, but
| receiving imagery from for example a GOES satellite
| requires a parabolic antenna.
| lbourdages wrote:
| > 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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
| :-).
| Forgotthepass8 wrote:
| Rather than encrypt why not steganography?
|
| encode your data within natural language and transmit using a
| natural sounding text to speech engine
|
| Maybe some AM Radio stations are already actually numbers
| stations V2.0
| subhro wrote:
| Huh? Amateur radio still exists in the world of cell phones,
| satellite phones, yada yada yada?
|
| That's stupid world war 2 technology.
|
| -- N9EX
| Crunchified wrote:
| Haha, well played from an Amateur Extra!
|
| 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!
| pythonguython wrote:
| 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.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| 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.
| Crunchified wrote:
| 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?
| threemux wrote:
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Wow in Europe it's kinda the opposite. Most countries' regulators
| want us to die off so they can sell the bands for lots of money.
|
| Unfortunately dieing off is exactly what's happening :(
| hatsunearu wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.radioworld.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/10/DOC-39...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/630-meter_band
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Why would your proximity to a power line stop you from using
| it? Also there is a band below that you can use as well.
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