I'm curious how many other people share my ambivalence toward amateur radio? I want to be interested in it, but since encryption is forbidden I can't think of very many things I'd really want to use it for, what w/ being unable to trust the authenticity of transmissions and having no confidentiality.

I enjoy listening to stuff w/ my RTL-SDR rig. I also find the emergency communication capability that radio amateurs provide a Good Thing(tm). I just can't see what, personally, it could possibly be useful for.

Talking about what gear you each have. There is a reason that is most of the conversations on amature radio : it is the only thing that you can safely talk to strangers about.

Some of us appeared in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20335110

You can sign stuff just fine. Authentication != encryption.

The last that I'd explored amateur radio I thought digital signatures were still a grey area. Good to know they're not. That does increase the usefulness dramatically.

No, not at all. The only thing that's prohibited is encoding your message as to obscure its meaning.

No need to study anything more than a newspaper archive. Look at the local papers every time a hurricane hits the United States, or there is another major natural disaster over the last 80 years.

Ham operators are always a communication lifeline in times of crisis.

feeling pretty good about the fact that some friends and i decided to get our licenses early into quarantine via remote online testing. highly recommend it if you're interested, some people are not aware of the fact that morse code requirements were dropped long ago and the question pool is available from a number of excellent study help sites (hamstudy.org is what I used).

My hope is for someone to complete a smartphone-based ad hoc mesh network that can use bluetooth, wifi to pass messages along, up to 6 hops or similar.

Currently, the closest thing I'm aware of for that is cwtch which is a ricochet.im rewrite

There was one out there for Android that worked great.

I wanted to build my own for emergency services and we figured out how to do some of the mesh routing but it didn't go far... WiFi Direct unfortunately only allows you to pair to one phone at a time (while bluetooth allows endless pairing outside of BLE)

this already exists in some forms [1] on top of the fact that amateur radio in general is quite capable of moving data whether by packet radio [2] (including packet radio BBS [3], things like hinternet [4], bbs over amateur radio, or plain old teletype (RTTY) as a means to operate access a console on a remote machine. there's a ton of interesting creative work being done in the space even though it isn't particularly mainstream-popular.

[1] http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ [2] http://www.choisser.com/packet/ [3] https://www.scc-ares-races.org/data/packet/index.html [4] https://www.kqed.org/quest/8440/ham-radio-helping-to-build-a...

FireChat and Bridgify have both been used during the Hong Kong protests.

It looks like Brigify[1] does support multiple relay hops on a bluetooth mesh network to send a message.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgefy

I have no idea what it’s called but when I was in Cuba 5 or 6 years ago they used something like this on their mobile phones. They basically had an “internet” via bluetooth but without needing to connect to the “real” internet which was very expensive and monitored by the government.

SNET, it seems. Awesome! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET

Cuba is amazing at making the most of what they have. I hadn’t heard of SNET before this, but I know they’ve kept classic cars running for decades out of necessity

I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that Cuba must have the highest concentration of “hackers” of any place in the world. We were on a bus going to the far west end of Cuba (where not many people travel to) and it broke down in the middle of no where and the bus driver managed to fix it with some scotch tape and a twisted up plastic shopping bag.

I’ve been to 70 countries and the Cuban people are hands down the most entrepreneurial of them all.

I heard of a few, but havent tried them:

disaster.radio

serval mesh

meshtastic

a different and cool project worth mentioning, more for distibuting teaching materials as I understand:

othernet.is

Just got a couple Baofeng's the other week to dabble in that world a bit.

Are you aware that it's illegal to "dabble" in that world without a license?

Not transmitting; just listening and figuring things out before taking the next step. I'm well aware.

For definitions of dabble that don't include transmitting, its most certainly not.

One of the best ways to get ready to take the Technician test is to buy a cheap handheld and figure out how to listen in on the local repeater. Being able to apply what you're reading in books to real world stuff is a fantastic learning opportunity.

Or Satellite communicators/phones. Iridium bypasses ground gateways when you commuicate from one communicator to another.

Or more likely: push people into whatsapp and voip

Doubtful, considering you need a license, equipment, knowledge, etc.

Chad and Karen don’t give two shits about it.