And there's a ton of perfectly allowable obfuscation techniques that are good enough to secure most comms while still following the letter of the regulation. It's true, this isn't going to replace internet applications, but that's not why hams are doing this to begin with.

Wrong. This is only true in the sense that the bits sent appear to be randomly chosen. Encrypted content sent over radio is still going to adhere to a modulation scheme like FSK, QSK, or something. A simpler analogue is sending coded Morse code. Yes, the dots and dashes appear random, but it's certainly not noise you can very clearly recognize it as Morse. Also, you need to send your callsign in clear text in each transmission. So people will see your call sign and then unintelligible bits after it, and it's easily recognized as encrypted transmissions.

What you're describing is more akin to frequency hopping where RF transmissions are sent out over a broad spectrum. But even then it's still distinguishable from noise unless a very fast hop interval is used.

You're right that you'll probably not get in trouble for it. The FCC really only cares if you're disrupting much more important activities.

BTW, amateurs are limited in what they can use radio for. Replacing existing communication systems is not allowed, efffectively meaning that can't have non-ham users. The systems I know about are for ham-only communication, like linking repeater sites.

I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).

https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum

Also:

https://discord.gg/Ay7tj7w4

128-1024 Kbps generally means a ridiculously large bandwidth compared to what most HAM channels allow unless you're really close to your recipient and can use a very wide QAM modulation, in which case your equipment is going to be $$. Your best bet is to stick to the ISM bands, which is where WiFi is anyway.

so 1024kbps with the sort of technology that exists in the space right now is basically larger than the spectrum available to us in any band in HF. 128kbit transmitted is probably larger than the spectrum available (you can't transmit past the band edges per license, even if it's "splatter") on all of the HF bands, too.

SNR + bandwidth goes into a calculation of the Shannon limit of a channel.