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A comment on FCC will vote on plan to remove outdated amateur radio technical restrictions. Parent comment

Re:FCC will vote on plan to remove outdated amateur radio te... by twiclo on Saturday October 28, 2023 @04:31PM (#38053114)
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.
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Re:FCC will vote on plan to remove outdated amateur radio te... by emptybits on Saturday October 28, 2023 @04:45PM (#38053208)
> 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/subchapter-D...

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Re:FCC will vote on plan to remove outdated amateur radio te... by chriscjcj on Saturday October 28, 2023 @05:05PM (#38053369)
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.

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