Under the noise floor at what distance? If you don't want to be a bright beacon at a mile, then you're not going to have a lot of signal at a hundred miles.

yeah occurred to me a while after posting :-D

Physics aside, I think the FCC is very, very slowly considering removing the "no encryption" aspect of ham radio. The arguments against encryption seem to be weak, and revolve around "if we don't know what people are saying, we won't know if they're trying to use it for commercial purposes" which is just simply not true. Oh well, here's to hoping the FCC will move into this century!