7 ms·

Bandwidth negotiation - Uh, no. Human in the loop with ears can hear a complaint of interference and stop or adjust. Autonegotiation just turns up the power u

by VLM 5y ago

Bandwidth negotiation - Uh, no. Human in the loop with ears can hear a complaint of interference and stop or adjust. Autonegotiation just turns up the power until the victim can't use the service anymore. RF is not a phone line. Note that we have legal things like RSID mode detection, which is not autonegotiation. Autonegotiation is a great technology for military anti-jamming purposes, not ham radio. Spread spectrum - The coding gain from SS varies with the bandwidth spread across, so SS over a narrow enough channel... isn't even SS anymore. That said we seem to agree that VHF and up there's plenty of space to channelize and regulate by frequency. What does anyone gain from it other than it interferes with anything else in its channel? Encryption - You haven't explained why its needed. "I can't talk to you, you can't talk to me" isn't very neighborly or ham radio friendly. So its not needed and only provides downsides. Emcom is difficult enough without everyone not sharing secret keys. What part 97.1 "basis and purpose" section does secretive private transmissions benefit? I mean, if it was useful for some ham radio purpose, sure sounds cool go for it. Encryption is certainly very useful for non-ham-radio purposes, but then by definition it shouldn't be on the ham bands anyway. I admit there are weird exceptions where encryption might be useful, which are already written into regulation, like 97.211 "Space telecommand station" part (b) permits space satellite control uplinks to be encrypted, but only the control signals, which makes sense, so some rando doesn't take over a satellite... "New technologies won't add or remove the underlying need for being neighborly." Agreed. As of 2021 nobody has invented a technology for wideband digital to coexist with, well, anything, other than regulating under a channelized system, which seems impossible for international HF. Your three main arguments seem to boil down to "why can't I jam other people?" whereas my point of view is "why would anyone want to jam other people" so we're probably never going to get along.

a-dub 5y ago
as someone who is not familiar with this world (but takes deep interest in (n)etiquette), would someone be willing to do a quick breakdown of ham netiquette, "being neighborly", fears of encryption and how abuse is managed in the ham world? i ask because maybe there are some learnings and lessons there that could apply to internet policy today. it sounds like certain things, like anonymity, are banned? there's some sort of community policing? i'm super curious.
- jtdressel 5y ago
  I don't have a lot of time, but this was an interesting question. If you message me I'll dig up references. There are nuances and exceptions to almost everything I list below. The radio spectrum is a scarce resource. Two of the main reasons amateur radio users are given access to the spectrum is to help with disaster recovery and to advance the art and science of radio. Callsigns are public - you can look up anyone's to see who they are. You're required to give your callsign at the end of your transmission, and every 10 minutes. There are some limitations on content. No music, no profanity, no commercial uses, and no encryption. netiquette varies based on what you are doing. In general, shorter range bands have better sound quality and are more casual. Longer range has worse sound quality (or no sound like morse or ft8). If you're on one of the shorter range bands (e.g. 70cm) you'll often find people who are keeping in touch with friends, or just looking for someone to talk to. On the longer range, you'll run into stuff like contests - all the other person wants to know is who you are, and where you are. They're trying to see either how many contacts they can make in a period of time or how far away they're able to make contacts. There are "formal traffic" nets - which pass messages. Local nets will route traffic they can't deliver to regional nets, and then back down to local nets. Usually they just pass practice traffic around - until a disaster occurs and they are needed. More info https://www.arrl.org/nts-manual https://www.arrl.org/nts-manual The lowest level license is the Technician. You can find the Technician exam pool online in several formats. https://www.arrl.org/files/file/VEs/2018-2022%20Tech%20Class%20Pool%20Final%20with%20errata.pdf https://www.arrl.org/files/file/VEs/2018-2022%20Tech%20Class... Edit: I forgot about you abuse question. Hams tend to police their own or will work with the FCC to report people misusing the airwaves. The practice version of this is called "fox hunting" - where someone places a transmitter and you try to find it. Most hams care about keeping the hobby alive. If they find someone who's broadcasting with too much power or without a license usually they'll try to work with that person to correct the behavior. If that doesn't work, they'll often work with the FCC.
- swalberg 5y ago
  Only been a Ham for 2 years, but the etiquette I've observed falls along the lines of "don't do things that make it hard for other people to have fun". Like checking to see if the frequency is in use before sending, and not blasting out a wide signal when a narrow one will do. Respecting band plans, both formal and informal, especially digital people sticking around established watering holes and not splattering the CW areas. Don't tune up (sending a tone to configure your antenna tuner) on someone's frequency. Another part is "let people do their thing". Like if someone's in a special activity and managing a pileup (lots of people trying to call), just give them the exchange and move on. Due to the asymmetric nature of propagation, stuff happens. You may not hear anyone using the frequency but they hear you just fine. If band conditions take a turn for the worse, politely tell the other person you're losing them and thanks for the conversation. Anonymity is banned; FCC part 97 says you have to use your call sign every 10 minutes and at the end of the transmission. Ultimately the FCC is responsible for enforcing these but of course don't have the time. People can report people to the FCC and they _may_ open an investigation depending on that nature of it. There's also the ARRL volunteer monitoring program where participants listen on the air and, through the program, send out notices of good and bad behavior, optionally referring cases to the FCC. It's usually stuff like "guy constantly being a jackass on a repeater and ruining it for others", with a good bit of "sending outside your privileges" and "not identifying yourself". That said we've all accidentally sent outside our privileges, we've all stepped on people. It happens. As amateurs we know that if we don't do a good job of operating we'll lose the spectrum, so it's usually not a huge problem. There are jerks, there are also people that don't know they're being jerks.
kragen 5y ago
There's very little emergency communication that wouldn't benefit from at least cryptographic signatures; in many cases it's also important to be able to communicate private data in emergencies. Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies. There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too. The broader problem is that prohibiting new technologies in ham radio until they've been demonstrated to be useful (in your case, demonstrated to be useful in ham radio, despite being prohibited at the time, but most people are less blatantly unreasonable) is a recipe for, at best, chasing the taillights of commercial radio systems, and more commonly total technological stagnation and gradual abandonment.
- VLM 5y ago
  > Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies. I can't even imagine what would require encryption ... maybe PII medical traffic under some peculiar artificial scenario and most pessimistic possible HIPPA interpretation? Now remember, that the stereotype of ham radio emcom is people roll up with no idea how to program their HT to the correct frequencies so they can't even participate. So demanding everyone participate in a GPG WoT or join a Kerberos domain to share encryption keys is an absolute non-starter. If the general public cannot participate without extensive preparation before the event, it means its not part 97 emcom, its just a poor low budget imitation of part 90, its not part 97 operation at all. Why not get GMRS licenses? Remember there is the perpetual battle in emcom between the people who think "provide emergency communications" applies to Big Brother despite his infinite budget outclassing any possible Ham response, vs the people who think emergency communications is for the people or the general public or even for the individual. Both sides like to denigrate the other side, unfortunately. So consider I was listening to a rando ham "involuntary storm chaser" report a tornado sighting to the NWS a couple weeks ago. How, in that scenario does encryption help? By making it impossible for the ham to talk to the NWS station because they never shared keys in advance or they shared the 2020 keys and not the 2021 keys? By making it impossible for the general public to hear the tornado report they would be safer not knowing? Consider something topical, like the hurricane in NO. A rando member of the general ham radio public reports hurricane related flooding. The value encryption provides is making it impossible for the ham radio operator to talk to people to make the report, and encryption also makes it impossible for the general ham radio public to help. "Real ham radio emcom" situation he'd just dial up the repeater and talk to net control and make his report and move on with life. Somehow encryption would help, but ... how? Edited to add: > There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too. I forgot to agree with you on that. Repeater control links and the like.
krofptN 5y ago
While I tend to agree more with your answers than edrxty baseless claims about spread spectrum and unrealistic bandwidth negotiation (doesn't work with hidden nodes), it's important to note that there are alternative models to the ham spectrum management model. Namely: ISM short range device (SRD) - the rules are very simple: transmit anything you want, no more than xxx watts, tx duty cycle no more than 1%. IMHO, this can be scaled to ham frequencies (ex: 0.01% duty cycle). ISM 2.4 GHz - the rules are (basically) transmit only if no other signal is detected above threshold (-75dBm). Exponential back off otherwise. This is also called the Aloha model. This model also works most of the time, although its applicability to HF propagation is unclear.
- VLM 5y ago
  > This is also called the Aloha model The history of HF packet radio going back almost 40 years now, shows it stomps things pretty bad. RTTY and PSK31 ops simply cannot operate nearby HF packet channels. Aloha DOES work really well for decades on "toll quality VHF FM" strong high SNR local packet radio LANs. Everyone's gotta be able to hear everyone or else channel thruput drops to about zero. Easy on a city wide VHF FM packet lan, impossible on HF. Reminds me of thin net ethernet in the 80s (thicknet also, LOL). One babbling transmitter and the whole LAN is down for everyone.
edrxty 5y ago
I feel like you're taking an extremely narrow view of use cases, but I apologize I'm coming off as antagonistic, it's not my intent. I really just want people to open up to expanding what's possible in our bands. The ham bands are for experimentation. Currently experimentation is essentially banned as the most of the biggest recent innovations are against the rules and the old guard wants to ban the rest (see FT8/WSPR). Negotiation - there are plenty of bandwidth negotiation strategies, not just scream louder. You can listen and avoid areas where people are obviously talking, it doesn't take human level intellect to detect signal. SS - interference avoidance is the biggest use case. There are a number of different techniques here, not just noise vomit, chirp being one of the more interesting. Encryption - Obviously nobody in their right mind is going to sit there and scream about a tornado on an encrypted channel or try to coordinate encrypted emcom. Simplifying ham to the point where anyone can use it is called the FRS band and as such we don't need to worry about that here. There are plenty of useful cases though, remote command/telemetry being only one of many. Experimenting with encrypted modes/algorithms/hardware is the most relevant, as well as just wanting the ability to have a private conversation from time to time. Lets also not forget that it's legal in Europe and they have yet to meet a firey ham demise. 2021 - and with these rules there never will be one. Private industry has no interest but spectrum is finite and human needs are infinite. Developing such a mode would be extremely useful if the FCC ever gets around to increasing the size and number of ISM bands as more applications arise. I'd be willing to meet you with this: the HF bands are touchy, I fully agree there's a legitimate interest in keeping things the way they are >=20m. I think the wild west should really open up at VHF and above however. There just isn't any use save one repeater out of hundreds every few hours in a sea of blue waterfall. Even if encryption/SS/WB/whatever was legalized on 2m/70cm and WILDLY abused (it wouldn't be) I don't think anyone would really even notice.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  I know quite a few people who would rather use free encrypted ham radio (if it existed) than pay a yearly fee for business band. And if it was encrypted, how would the FCC ever notice (or get alerted by other noticing hams) that it was getting used for business?

by VLM 5y ago

a-dub 5y ago

as someone who is not familiar with this world (but takes deep interest in (n)etiquette), would someone be willing to do a quick breakdown of ham netiquette, "being neighborly", fears of encryption and how abuse is managed in the ham world? i ask because maybe there are some learnings and lessons there that could apply to internet policy today. it sounds like certain things, like anonymity, are banned? there's some sort of community policing? i'm super curious.

jtdressel 5y ago
I don't have a lot of time, but this was an interesting question. If you message me I'll dig up references. There are nuances and exceptions to almost everything I list below. The radio spectrum is a scarce resource. Two of the main reasons amateur radio users are given access to the spectrum is to help with disaster recovery and to advance the art and science of radio. Callsigns are public - you can look up anyone's to see who they are. You're required to give your callsign at the end of your transmission, and every 10 minutes. There are some limitations on content. No music, no profanity, no commercial uses, and no encryption. netiquette varies based on what you are doing. In general, shorter range bands have better sound quality and are more casual. Longer range has worse sound quality (or no sound like morse or ft8). If you're on one of the shorter range bands (e.g. 70cm) you'll often find people who are keeping in touch with friends, or just looking for someone to talk to. On the longer range, you'll run into stuff like contests - all the other person wants to know is who you are, and where you are. They're trying to see either how many contacts they can make in a period of time or how far away they're able to make contacts. There are "formal traffic" nets - which pass messages. Local nets will route traffic they can't deliver to regional nets, and then back down to local nets. Usually they just pass practice traffic around - until a disaster occurs and they are needed. More info https://www.arrl.org/nts-manual https://www.arrl.org/nts-manual The lowest level license is the Technician. You can find the Technician exam pool online in several formats. https://www.arrl.org/files/file/VEs/2018-2022%20Tech%20Class%20Pool%20Final%20with%20errata.pdf https://www.arrl.org/files/file/VEs/2018-2022%20Tech%20Class... Edit: I forgot about you abuse question. Hams tend to police their own or will work with the FCC to report people misusing the airwaves. The practice version of this is called "fox hunting" - where someone places a transmitter and you try to find it. Most hams care about keeping the hobby alive. If they find someone who's broadcasting with too much power or without a license usually they'll try to work with that person to correct the behavior. If that doesn't work, they'll often work with the FCC.
swalberg 5y ago
Only been a Ham for 2 years, but the etiquette I've observed falls along the lines of "don't do things that make it hard for other people to have fun". Like checking to see if the frequency is in use before sending, and not blasting out a wide signal when a narrow one will do. Respecting band plans, both formal and informal, especially digital people sticking around established watering holes and not splattering the CW areas. Don't tune up (sending a tone to configure your antenna tuner) on someone's frequency. Another part is "let people do their thing". Like if someone's in a special activity and managing a pileup (lots of people trying to call), just give them the exchange and move on. Due to the asymmetric nature of propagation, stuff happens. You may not hear anyone using the frequency but they hear you just fine. If band conditions take a turn for the worse, politely tell the other person you're losing them and thanks for the conversation. Anonymity is banned; FCC part 97 says you have to use your call sign every 10 minutes and at the end of the transmission. Ultimately the FCC is responsible for enforcing these but of course don't have the time. People can report people to the FCC and they _may_ open an investigation depending on that nature of it. There's also the ARRL volunteer monitoring program where participants listen on the air and, through the program, send out notices of good and bad behavior, optionally referring cases to the FCC. It's usually stuff like "guy constantly being a jackass on a repeater and ruining it for others", with a good bit of "sending outside your privileges" and "not identifying yourself". That said we've all accidentally sent outside our privileges, we've all stepped on people. It happens. As amateurs we know that if we don't do a good job of operating we'll lose the spectrum, so it's usually not a huge problem. There are jerks, there are also people that don't know they're being jerks.

kragen 5y ago

There's very little emergency communication that wouldn't benefit from at least cryptographic signatures; in many cases it's also important to be able to communicate private data in emergencies. Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies. There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too. The broader problem is that prohibiting new technologies in ham radio until they've been demonstrated to be useful (in your case, demonstrated to be useful in ham radio, despite being prohibited at the time, but most people are less blatantly unreasonable) is a recipe for, at best, chasing the taillights of commercial radio systems, and more commonly total technological stagnation and gradual abandonment.

VLM 5y ago
> Not allowing encryption makes amateur radio of very little use in emergencies. I can't even imagine what would require encryption ... maybe PII medical traffic under some peculiar artificial scenario and most pessimistic possible HIPPA interpretation? Now remember, that the stereotype of ham radio emcom is people roll up with no idea how to program their HT to the correct frequencies so they can't even participate. So demanding everyone participate in a GPG WoT or join a Kerberos domain to share encryption keys is an absolute non-starter. If the general public cannot participate without extensive preparation before the event, it means its not part 97 emcom, its just a poor low budget imitation of part 90, its not part 97 operation at all. Why not get GMRS licenses? Remember there is the perpetual battle in emcom between the people who think "provide emergency communications" applies to Big Brother despite his infinite budget outclassing any possible Ham response, vs the people who think emergency communications is for the people or the general public or even for the individual. Both sides like to denigrate the other side, unfortunately. So consider I was listening to a rando ham "involuntary storm chaser" report a tornado sighting to the NWS a couple weeks ago. How, in that scenario does encryption help? By making it impossible for the ham to talk to the NWS station because they never shared keys in advance or they shared the 2020 keys and not the 2021 keys? By making it impossible for the general public to hear the tornado report they would be safer not knowing? Consider something topical, like the hurricane in NO. A rando member of the general ham radio public reports hurricane related flooding. The value encryption provides is making it impossible for the ham radio operator to talk to people to make the report, and encryption also makes it impossible for the general ham radio public to help. "Real ham radio emcom" situation he'd just dial up the repeater and talk to net control and make his report and move on with life. Somehow encryption would help, but ... how? Edited to add: > There are lots of "telecommand" use cases that aren't to satellites, too. I forgot to agree with you on that. Repeater control links and the like.

krofptN 5y ago

While I tend to agree more with your answers than edrxty baseless claims about spread spectrum and unrealistic bandwidth negotiation (doesn't work with hidden nodes), it's important to note that there are alternative models to the ham spectrum management model. Namely: ISM short range device (SRD) - the rules are very simple: transmit anything you want, no more than xxx watts, tx duty cycle no more than 1%. IMHO, this can be scaled to ham frequencies (ex: 0.01% duty cycle). ISM 2.4 GHz - the rules are (basically) transmit only if no other signal is detected above threshold (-75dBm). Exponential back off otherwise. This is also called the Aloha model. This model also works most of the time, although its applicability to HF propagation is unclear.

VLM 5y ago
> This is also called the Aloha model The history of HF packet radio going back almost 40 years now, shows it stomps things pretty bad. RTTY and PSK31 ops simply cannot operate nearby HF packet channels. Aloha DOES work really well for decades on "toll quality VHF FM" strong high SNR local packet radio LANs. Everyone's gotta be able to hear everyone or else channel thruput drops to about zero. Easy on a city wide VHF FM packet lan, impossible on HF. Reminds me of thin net ethernet in the 80s (thicknet also, LOL). One babbling transmitter and the whole LAN is down for everyone.

edrxty 5y ago

I feel like you're taking an extremely narrow view of use cases, but I apologize I'm coming off as antagonistic, it's not my intent. I really just want people to open up to expanding what's possible in our bands. The ham bands are for experimentation. Currently experimentation is essentially banned as the most of the biggest recent innovations are against the rules and the old guard wants to ban the rest (see FT8/WSPR). Negotiation - there are plenty of bandwidth negotiation strategies, not just scream louder. You can listen and avoid areas where people are obviously talking, it doesn't take human level intellect to detect signal. SS - interference avoidance is the biggest use case. There are a number of different techniques here, not just noise vomit, chirp being one of the more interesting. Encryption - Obviously nobody in their right mind is going to sit there and scream about a tornado on an encrypted channel or try to coordinate encrypted emcom. Simplifying ham to the point where anyone can use it is called the FRS band and as such we don't need to worry about that here. There are plenty of useful cases though, remote command/telemetry being only one of many. Experimenting with encrypted modes/algorithms/hardware is the most relevant, as well as just wanting the ability to have a private conversation from time to time. Lets also not forget that it's legal in Europe and they have yet to meet a firey ham demise. 2021 - and with these rules there never will be one. Private industry has no interest but spectrum is finite and human needs are infinite. Developing such a mode would be extremely useful if the FCC ever gets around to increasing the size and number of ISM bands as more applications arise. I'd be willing to meet you with this: the HF bands are touchy, I fully agree there's a legitimate interest in keeping things the way they are >=20m. I think the wild west should really open up at VHF and above however. There just isn't any use save one repeater out of hundreds every few hours in a sea of blue waterfall. Even if encryption/SS/WB/whatever was legalized on 2m/70cm and WILDLY abused (it wouldn't be) I don't think anyone would really even notice.

BenjiWiebe 5y ago
I know quite a few people who would rather use free encrypted ham radio (if it existed) than pay a yearly fee for business band. And if it was encrypted, how would the FCC ever notice (or get alerted by other noticing hams) that it was getting used for business?