IMO that's a great way to set up a sandbox: it has built in crowd control and a mechanism to keep out flagrant abuse.

Yeah, it doesn't scale to the moon, but that's the whole point: it's a proving ground, not a moon rocket.

Don't scale to the moon, but with a full license you can put out enough power to bounce a signal off the moon...

> IMO that's a great way to set up a sandbox: it has built in crowd control and a mechanism to keep out flagrant abuse.

Sadly nothing is really stopping anyone from buying radios online and transmitting garbage. Sure the FCC will come knocking if someone flagrantly transmits without regard for others.

Then again, there are people who police themselves and others. Here's an interesting story about an investigation into a camouflaged jammer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZjInmHsWdM

HFDF used to be difficult for the military. Now it's easy for hobbyists. Times change. Rules need to keep up.

I don't mean "chase a squealer with a truck and a dimensional antenna," either, I mean persistent always-on infrastructure to plot emissions on a map. That's a hobby thing now.

It's not that it doesn't scale - it's just there's a reason people use letters to communicate and not postcards.

People expect a modicum of privacy which ham radio, to its detriment, denies.

Ham radio is not meant for that though. Its expressly meant for education and scientific experimentation by amateurs. What it actually gets used for is Boomers chewing the fat and LARPing as emergency services dispatchers mostly but the allocations were put in place to allow people to connect with one another and learn the science of RF in a practical way.

The sad part is that the FCC has been more interested in maintaining the status quo than actually continuing the spirit of the hobby. There is nothing experimental or ground breaking about talking to someone states away using an HF transceiver that cost $4k in analog FM. That stopped being innovative 80 years ago. There are a lot of interesting things being done with RF that are off limits to amateurs because they require a business license.

But you are talking about normal people using radio for normal conversations. That's a distinct use case. Its something worth discussing, the FCC has lagged behind there too but its not the same thing as Ham.

>and LARPing as emergency services dispatchers

Uh, they might LARP in your neck of the woods but my county HEAVILY relies on amateur operators for weather related emergencies all year long (tornado country plus snow country).

It's the primary reason my wife and I are getting into amateur radio.

> But you are talking about normal people using radio for normal conversations.

> What it actually gets used for is Boomers chewing the fat

I'm only one data point, but I doubt my generation would 'chew the fat' on a call that anyone else in a wide radius would be listening in on. Not, at least, about anything that's personal. That's the point of my postcard analogy.

Have you never heard of twitter?

It also completely prevents any interesting radio experimentation. There isn't anything left on that frontier that couldn't be conflated with encryption.

As someone who once believed this, this statement is simply not true. Experimentation in ham radio is largely about the physical layer, with maybe some layer 2-4 work when it comes to building low-scale communications infrastructure. Encryption is not implemented at this level, and the limitations on encrypted content do not impede research into new digital modes or actual radio science.

I think it is worth asking why modern digital radio standards (e.g. P25, DMR, LTE, 5G) were largely developed outside the ham community. My survey level understanding is they came from the communication needs of their users and are not a natural evolution of something that hams would build, with or without encryption. When I was researching DMR, there's a lot of stuff that is unnecessarily clunky when considering the use case of a ham QSO. Conversely, the business users of DMR want more structure than what's provided with amateur-designed digital modes. With 5G, I think there are some real technical and capital barriers, i.e., very few amateurs have access to the grade of test equipment needed to engineer and experiment with systems at those frequencies.

To your first point I think you are missing their meaning a bit. There is actual encryption, like AES. And then there are communications methods that aren't open by default. The way in which the FCC regulations are penned means Ham transmissions can't be private in any way. So no just actual encryption but pretty much anyone with a compatible transceiver should be able to listen in to what you are saying at any time.

That level of permissiveness can be problematic because some technologies are by their nature not compliant. FHSS comes to mind. Its not encrypted but if you don't know know the sequence it might as well be. WiFi, bluetooth and most cell protocols use FHSS. So if you wanted to experiment with digital data transfer and make it in any way robust in a congested area you could not do so as a Ham. Its implicitly illegal.

To your second point I agree. DMR, P25, TETRA etc were developed with police departments and such in mind. To get the full use out of them requires a heavy investment infrastructure for trunking systems. And their programming models assume a set it and leave it use case where the operators are not trained or even savvy to RF comms.

This makes them at best clunky for Hams. DMR has caught on not because its the best, but I think because its easier and cheaper for radio makers to license it. In Europe Type 1 is also allowed unlicensed which gives the market momentum.

What's more conflated with encryption than e.g. the level of encoding you find in DVB-S or FT-8?

Ft-8, jt-9, jt-65, and wspr all break the rules when on 60 meters.

No one cares...

You're only allowed to transmit square on center of the allotted channels, and, this is the important bit, one person at a time. All the modes that JT invented flat out ignore both rules for 60 meter transmissions.

I don't care, but I get sick of people telling me that my pactor modem is "illegal".

60m in the US I guess, where it's a very restricted secondary use of a military band. That's quite a special case.

Also these modes being ok or not on 60m has nothing to do with the question I asked?

FT-8 has issues beyond what is or is not encoding that could be argued (and is) to be in violation of certain rules.

It's easy though. You can memorize the Technician pool in 5-10 hours with https://www.hamstudy.org or their app - the app is GREAT - (I know, my wife and I just did it and are testing for the tech Saturday, I've passed the last 100 something practice tests in a row) and the General is only slightly harder.

I'm working 60-70 hours a week, plus class, plus church responsibilities and I'm consistently getting 70-71% correct on the General already just from using the app for a half hour or so a day and listening to the question pool via KB6NU's book while I work since Monday morning. I probably won't get up to passing it Saturday but I can just do an online test in the next few weeks once my Tech is in the database Monday or Tuesday.

Getting the General gives you plenty of room to do stuff like this.

I'm gonna be a little bit of a jerk, here. The general can be crammed for but I don't think it should be. Cram the technician license if you just "gotta get on air". The general and extra should be reserved for people who can answer questions at their level and below. Merely reading part 97 of the FCC regulations is enough to technically pass the parts of all three that don't have anything to do with "a station", yet 90% of every argument I've had with hams is interpretation of said rules ( and part 95, and part 90.)

I don't want to discourage anyone, but the investment in effort and money between tech and general is in the 4-5 digit range of dollars and hours.

By all means study. But cramming the test questions isn't studying and will leave you as an appliance operator that will constantly be told, if ever on the air, that they're doing something either rude, against the rules, or dangerous.

I don't feel that any of the questions on the general actually equip me to know how to even connect the components of a complete radio setup up, so I'll just have to agree to disagree.

A good chunk of the questions are memorizing frequencies and wattages you're allowed to use for various things... something you can print off on a chart and tape to the wall.

there's questions about common mode interference and other RFI things, cabling, antennas, and things like that. strict "rules only" is technician - what bands, how much power (which gets interesting in quite a few bands), and so on. Technician is like "set up a modem to get on a BBS."

Getting a technicians license is probably easier than you think. I've heard of amateur radio clubs putting on all Saturday classes with people taking the test at the end. VHF radios aren't expensive, in fact they're importing some from China that are dirt cheap.

Course if you want to work on the HF bands then it requires a bit more work to get the higher class licenses.

This is a pro... learn some radio stuff, pay a tiny amount of money, and get a licence to communicate without the need for random providers.