I am hoping they explained why.

Most people who complain about the encryption regulation just completely disregard the reason for encryption in the first place (ie, all other regulations become unenforceable if encryption is allowed).

The unenforceable argument isn't really a thing. If we look at some common encryption standards, the call sign is in the clear as it has to be for routing.

In the case where someone is swearing with their friends over an encrypted channel, it's just not a problem, no child will hear the swears without a quantum supercomputer.

In the case where a business is illegally using ham bands to avoid paying license fees, they can already do this, nobody is actually checking. You can encrypt P25 on the bands all day long because nobody has radios that work with that digital mode and nobody will spend the time running signal analysis to figure out that A) it's P25, B) it's encrypted and C) where it's coming from. If it became rampant the FCC has the tools to very quickly figure out all of these things and if the broadcasts don't have a call sign and are coming from a business premises then it's obviously breaking the law anyway.

If it could be a problem, it already would be. All the Chinese digital business radios support encryption now. We're just not allowed to use it because people are scared of bogeymen

Yes, people are checking. Repeated abuse of ham radio (in the US anyways) will eventually get enough hams mad that they will report to the FCC, which does investigate and crack down from time to time.

No, it isn't an instant 100% chance of retribution.

People are checking FM because it's trivial. I have yet to hear of someone getting caught using digital encryption entirely through band monitoring (ie not doing something obviously stupid elsewhere like bragging about it on social media)

It's 2021... ham operators hear someone using the band for something digital, and then use the one of the many cheap SDR sticks to check what is using the channel.

One call to a regulator, and it's done.

I think it's also because ham radio is supposed to be shared experimentation. Part of this is hearing someone trying something out and replying.

If everyone starts chatting with their friends on encrypted channels, we don't really have a community anymore. It was never meant to be a private chatbox.

I think it should be a bit less rigid in this day and age though. For example it should be allowed to use encryption for authentication purposes IMO. It's too easy now on digital modes to fake someone's callsign. Brandmeister has built some cool stuff with one time password but more complex authentication mechanisms aren't allowed. Apparently the FCC allows an exception for this but not every country does.

Do they? Maybe we need to figure out the essential subset of regulations that preserves the most essential aspects of the system while still permitting encryption.

I have no doubt it will be a huge mess and take a few tries to get right.

We should get started already -- if we don't, HAM will die, and it will deserve to die.

Mostly. Ham is meant for play, not as a primary means of communication or for commercial purposes.

If everything is encrypted, how could you tell? How could you even tell that the users were licensed?

By not encrypting the call signs because unencrypted call signs aren't the problematic restriction. It's the content restrictions that are stifling in the modern world.

Also: progress has changed the landscape. HFDF used to be difficult for the military but now it's easy for hobbyists, and not just in last-mile form, but in coordinated always-on infrastructure form. The regulations were not written with this in mind. With an active community this fact alone might obviate the need for many a regulation.

And I'm not broadcasting my legal name and mailing address so i can "play" with radio transmissions.

Don't conflate "it's extremely obviously not legal" with "people don't like it" (the latter camp you can always ignore, they fundamentally can't do that much in most cases except not support you. See e.g. the whining about pretty much any digital mode ever). But encryption on ham bands falls in the first bucket, which is a problem, and I doubt that's simply a "we need to advocate for changing it" matter.

Fun fact: in parts of the world, you can transmit pretty much whatever you want on CB, nobody is stopping you from running encrypted digimodes there. And for slow transmissions, one can probably squeeze something through ISM bands, despite the limitations there.

And you probably could develop a good mode on ham bands that has the foundations and does signatures but not encryption, and can switch to encrypted on other bands.

I have yet to hear what “progress” encryption enables that operating via and open protocol doesn’t.

FCC rules won't allow encryption. I'm not sure why the rules were made originally.

Encryption is indistinguishable from noise. So the difference between a high power encrypted transmission and high power jammer is semantic. Radio transmissions also propagate. Sometimes they propagate in unexpected ways reaching much farther than expected.

If you combine these things you end up with encrypted transmissions raising the noise floor for everyone in a band with no way to know if that noise is a transmission or actual noise. A lot of ham bands are already very noisy from natural sources, a bunch of encrypted transmissions increasing the noise floor just serves to make those bands inaccessible.

The propagation makes this problem even worse because encrypted transmissions can raise the noise floor for hams hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Even if an encrypted transmission uses a very narrow bandwidth (no worse than other digital modes) you're still monopolizing part of a very small band with a private conversation preventing others from using the shared resource.

To make matters worse encryption necessitates some form of error correction. Whether this is forward error correction, retransmission, or whatever it's necessary for a receiver to receive a correct ciphertext in order to decrypt a message. Error correction necessitates a higher duty cycle in order to send the error correcting overhead. So encrypted transmissions last longer than the equivalent unencrypted digital mode tying up limited bandwidth for a longer duration.

> Encryption is indistinguishable from noise. So the difference between a high power encrypted transmission and high power jammer is semantic

The difference, from an RF perspective, of an encrypted signal and a non encrypted signal is non-existent as the encryption takes place before the modulator. Therefore encrypted signals won't impact the noise flow for everyone in the band. This would only occur if the operator were using frequency hopping.

>you're still monopolizing part of a very small band with a private conversation preventing others from using the shared resource

Depending on the technology used in the receiver, this also isn't true. There are numerous techniques to allow for multiple carriers on the same band. CDMA for example would allow for this. It would take some coordination to make sure each carrier is using a different code but should be feasible for amateur radio operators. It all depends on how sophisticated their receiver is.

>Error correction necessitates a higher duty cycle

This is true and is why encrypted signals have lower data rates. So instead of having a longer transmission you lower the data rate to get the same effect.

> Therefore encrypted signals won't impact the noise flow for everyone in the band. This would only occur if the operator were using frequency hopping.

While the encrypted transmission will look like a regular digital mode the fact it can't decrypt the decoded symbols means it's effectively noise. Ham bands are for all hams. There are innumerable other ways to have a private conversation with targeted recipients.

> Depending on the technology used in the receiver, this also isn't true. There are numerous techniques to allow for multiple carriers on the same band. CDMA for example would allow for this. It would take some coordination to make sure each carrier is using a different code but should be feasible for amateur radio operators. It all depends on how sophisticated their receiver is.

Ham bands already have de facto CSMA, you wait for open air to transmit.

Ham bands are pretty small. Like the two most popular HF bands are only 300-350 kHz and not all of them are allocated for voice.

Ham radio relies on self-policing within the community to ensure compliance with the rules - the biggest one being "no commercial use".

The "no commercial use" rule ensures companies aren't using the limited ham radio spectrum as a workaround to getting their own dedicated license and frequency allocation.

If encryption were allowed, there'd be no way for other users to verify whether traffic is commercial or not.

I always thought that encryption not being allowed was a way to discourage illegal commercial use of it.

No business wants their comms in the clear with no means of verifying the sender of the message - so ham radio would be useless to them.

But even not-for-business, I don't want someone else to be able to impersonate others, so signatures/verification still needs to be supported. Otherwise someone who's good at voice impersonations of others could wreak havok.

There is no rule against using digital signatures for authentication. Your actual message just has to be in the clear.

The exact wording is in 97.113: "No amateur station shall transmit... messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning".

Because way back when long range radio was a plausible way for spies to communicate back to the homeland.

How would encryption work?

Encrypted communication is not allowed on the ham radio bands.

One could still run a numbers station? There's no way to prove the code words have any meaning beyond what is obvious.

> One could still run a numbers station? There's no way to prove the code words have any meaning beyond what is obvious.

I'm not so sure one could, legally. A number station would broadcast regularly a one-way communications, with no clear meaning. Here's an excerpt of the law from FCC part 97, which is actually surprisingly short and readable. It prohibits:

"messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification.

(5) Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services.

(b) An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules..."

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...

That’s a sure way of ending up with several old men yielding yagis like swords descend upon your house.