9 ms·

Texting via APRS has been a thing for about 20 years. It's also a fantastic way to publish both your phone number and the numbers of the people you are texting

by mikece 5y ago

Texting via APRS has been a thing for about 20 years. It's also a fantastic way to publish both your phone number and the numbers of the people you are texting in an easy to skim format. Digital modes is one of the areas where the HN crowd could introduce significant advancements to Amateur radio (while pissing off all of the older HAMs who just want to talk about the weather on 40m).

MisterTea 5y ago
And before APRS we had packet radio[1]. Around 1992/3 I remember going to Boy scout camp at ten mile river and a scoutmaster from another troop had a packet radio setup connected to a luggable PC in one of the buildings. I dont remember what it was for but the idea of wireless digital communications was exciting. Now its everywhere. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
- mikece 5y ago
  APRS is built on packet radio (AX.25 protocol IIRC).
edrxty 5y ago
It's safe only because nobody cares enough about ham radio to bother skimming anything. I've been pushing for encryption for years but just posting this well get a bunch of elmers posting upset replies. It's frustrating constantly being under the thumb of a generation that will not yield to progress
- vitaflo 5y ago
  I have yet to hear what “progress” encryption enables that operating via and open protocol doesn’t.
- 83457 5y ago
  How would encryption work?
  - jrockway 5y ago
    Encrypted communication is not allowed on the ham radio bands.
    - logfromblammo 5y ago
      One could still run a numbers station? There's no way to prove the code words have any meaning beyond what is obvious.
      - unoti 5y ago
        > One could still run a numbers station? There's no way to prove the code words have any meaning beyond what is obvious. I'm not so sure one could, legally. A number station would broadcast regularly a one-way communications, with no clear meaning. Here's an excerpt of the law from FCC part 97, which is actually surprisingly short and readable. It prohibits: "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification. (5) Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services. (b) An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules..." https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-97 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
      - hmrr 5y ago
        That’s a sure way of ending up with several old men yielding yagis like swords descend upon your house.
- abfan1127 5y ago
  FCC rules won't allow encryption. I'm not sure why the rules were made originally.
  - tjohns 5y ago
    Ham radio relies on self-policing within the community to ensure compliance with the rules - the biggest one being "no commercial use". The "no commercial use" rule ensures companies aren't using the limited ham radio spectrum as a workaround to getting their own dedicated license and frequency allocation. If encryption were allowed, there'd be no way for other users to verify whether traffic is commercial or not.
    - alibarber 5y ago
      I always thought that encryption not being allowed was a way to discourage illegal commercial use of it. No business wants their comms in the clear with no means of verifying the sender of the message - so ham radio would be useless to them.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        But even not-for-business, I don't want someone else to be able to impersonate others, so signatures/verification still needs to be supported. Otherwise someone who's good at voice impersonations of others could wreak havok.
        tjohns 5y ago
        There is no rule against using digital signatures for authentication. Your actual message just has to be in the clear. The exact wording is in 97.113: "No amateur station shall transmit... messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning".
  - Enginerrrd 5y ago
    Because way back when long range radio was a plausible way for spies to communicate back to the homeland.
- sseagull 5y ago
  I am hoping they explained why. Most people who complain about the encryption regulation just completely disregard the reason for encryption in the first place (ie, all other regulations become unenforceable if encryption is allowed).
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Do they? Maybe we need to figure out the essential subset of regulations that preserves the most essential aspects of the system while still permitting encryption. I have no doubt it will be a huge mess and take a few tries to get right. We should get started already -- if we don't, HAM will die, and it will deserve to die.
    - sseagull 5y ago
      Mostly. Ham is meant for play, not as a primary means of communication or for commercial purposes. If everything is encrypted, how could you tell? How could you even tell that the users were licensed?
      - jjoonathan 5y ago
        By not encrypting the call signs because unencrypted call signs aren't the problematic restriction. It's the content restrictions that are stifling in the modern world. Also: progress has changed the landscape. HFDF used to be difficult for the military but now it's easy for hobbyists, and not just in last-mile form, but in coordinated always-on infrastructure form. The regulations were not written with this in mind. With an active community this fact alone might obviate the need for many a regulation.
      - nyanpasu64 5y ago
        And I'm not broadcasting my legal name and mailing address so i can "play" with radio transmissions.
  - edrxty 5y ago
    The unenforceable argument isn't really a thing. If we look at some common encryption standards, the call sign is in the clear as it has to be for routing. In the case where someone is swearing with their friends over an encrypted channel, it's just not a problem, no child will hear the swears without a quantum supercomputer. In the case where a business is illegally using ham bands to avoid paying license fees, they can already do this, nobody is actually checking. You can encrypt P25 on the bands all day long because nobody has radios that work with that digital mode and nobody will spend the time running signal analysis to figure out that A) it's P25, B) it's encrypted and C) where it's coming from. If it became rampant the FCC has the tools to very quickly figure out all of these things and if the broadcasts don't have a call sign and are coming from a business premises then it's obviously breaking the law anyway. If it could be a problem, it already would be. All the Chinese digital business radios support encryption now. We're just not allowed to use it because people are scared of bogeymen
- detaro 5y ago
  Don't conflate "it's extremely obviously not legal" with "people don't like it" (the latter camp you can always ignore, they fundamentally can't do that much in most cases except not support you. See e.g. the whining about pretty much any digital mode ever). But encryption on ham bands falls in the first bucket, which is a problem, and I doubt that's simply a "we need to advocate for changing it" matter. Fun fact: in parts of the world, you can transmit pretty much whatever you want on CB, nobody is stopping you from running encrypted digimodes there. And for slow transmissions, one can probably squeeze something through ISM bands, despite the limitations there. And you probably could develop a good mode on ham bands that has the foundations and does signatures but not encryption, and can switch to encrypted on other bands.
thereddaikon 5y ago
Unfortunately the FCC's rules around the Ham bands and digital modes ends up restricting a lot of potential for advancement and experimentation.
- provobro 5y ago
  That and anyone using this would need a ham radio license
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    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.
    - generalizations 5y ago
      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.
      - edrxty 5y ago
        It also completely prevents any interesting radio experimentation. There isn't anything left on that frontier that couldn't be conflated with encryption.
        jmwilson 5y ago
        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.
rsync 5y ago
"Texting via APRS has been a thing for about 20 years." Yes, that's true. If, by "texting", you mean either: - A handheld radio attached to a laptop with a serial cable. - One of two (three ?) models ever produced that allowed you to key in APRS with T9 typing on a number pad. Yep, it's awesome.
- hmrr 5y ago
  Nailed it. It wasn’t and still isn’t useful or interesting because of the technical overhead of APRS reporting. Much prefer delving into the weak signal modes. JS8Call is interesting http://js8call.com/ http://js8call.com/ I wanted to write an iOS version of it. Just an iPad and a radio using the audio interface and you’re there. But I don’t have the time to do it.
- unoti 5y ago
  > If, by "texting", you mean either a handheld radio attached to a laptop with a serial cable, or one of two (three ?) models ever produced that allowed you to key in APRS with T9 typing... Actually, you can do a good amount of digital modes radio stuff using nothing more than a radio and a smartphone. For example, I myself have made a lot of contacts with people using PSK31 without a cable, using my iPhone speaker and mic near the radio handset. Digging into how these digital modes work is interesting intellectually. It's doable to implement the signal processing to implement these modes in code. And once you have one mode well-understood, it's also doable to come up with ideas on how to improve upon them and make new modes. Lots of HN readers would be able to do both of those things, and probably enjoy it. ("Modes" here means a way to communicate information over the radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amateur_radio_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amateur_radio_modes )
tdeck 5y ago
I've sent an SMS over the APRS gateway using nothing but a cheap handheld radio and the APRSdroid app. The app can emit audible data chirps, so you just compose your APRS message, hold your phone near the radio, and push the PTT button. Not very practical, but there's no custom hardware or connector required!
GekkePrutser 5y ago
And texting over AX.25 packet radio was a thing before that :) We used to have whole conversations on the local BBS and sometimes even in UI broadcast frames watched in the Rx monitor. Repeated a few times to compensate for loss of course. After all APRS is just a protocol atop AX.25. To be honest I never saw the fun in APRS. I don't want to broadcast my position all the time. And that's really all its used for, save the occasional 1:1 text message. When APRS became popular it took the whole packet group chat thing away. That was a bit like IRC. The old packet radio had much more to offer. It was amazing because the internet wasn't available to us at that time and BBSes required phone calls by the minute. Being online all day would cost more than a monthly wage. But I could be online and chat on packet all day for free. But because its speed never continued scaling up, it was just too slow for anything but APRS in the end. It's sad that this whole community has gone. I kinda hoped the Digi modes would bring something back but it's mainly just voice. International group voice which is in itself amazing but I miss the chats.
madengr 5y ago
There have been significant advancements, without the HN community involved.

by mikece 5y ago

MisterTea 5y ago

And before APRS we had packet radio[1]. Around 1992/3 I remember going to Boy scout camp at ten mile river and a scoutmaster from another troop had a packet radio setup connected to a luggable PC in one of the buildings. I dont remember what it was for but the idea of wireless digital communications was exciting. Now its everywhere. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

mikece 5y ago
APRS is built on packet radio (AX.25 protocol IIRC).

edrxty 5y ago

It's safe only because nobody cares enough about ham radio to bother skimming anything. I've been pushing for encryption for years but just posting this well get a bunch of elmers posting upset replies. It's frustrating constantly being under the thumb of a generation that will not yield to progress

vitaflo 5y ago
I have yet to hear what “progress” encryption enables that operating via and open protocol doesn’t.
83457 5y ago
How would encryption work?
- jrockway 5y ago
  Encrypted communication is not allowed on the ham radio bands.
  - logfromblammo 5y ago
    One could still run a numbers station? There's no way to prove the code words have any meaning beyond what is obvious.
    - unoti 5y ago
      > One could still run a numbers station? There's no way to prove the code words have any meaning beyond what is obvious. I'm not so sure one could, legally. A number station would broadcast regularly a one-way communications, with no clear meaning. Here's an excerpt of the law from FCC part 97, which is actually surprisingly short and readable. It prohibits: "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except as otherwise provided herein; obscene or indecent words or language; or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification. (5) Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services. (b) An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules..." https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-97 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
    - hmrr 5y ago
      That’s a sure way of ending up with several old men yielding yagis like swords descend upon your house.
abfan1127 5y ago
FCC rules won't allow encryption. I'm not sure why the rules were made originally.
- tjohns 5y ago
  Ham radio relies on self-policing within the community to ensure compliance with the rules - the biggest one being "no commercial use". The "no commercial use" rule ensures companies aren't using the limited ham radio spectrum as a workaround to getting their own dedicated license and frequency allocation. If encryption were allowed, there'd be no way for other users to verify whether traffic is commercial or not.
  - alibarber 5y ago
    I always thought that encryption not being allowed was a way to discourage illegal commercial use of it. No business wants their comms in the clear with no means of verifying the sender of the message - so ham radio would be useless to them.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      But even not-for-business, I don't want someone else to be able to impersonate others, so signatures/verification still needs to be supported. Otherwise someone who's good at voice impersonations of others could wreak havok.
      - tjohns 5y ago
        There is no rule against using digital signatures for authentication. Your actual message just has to be in the clear. The exact wording is in 97.113: "No amateur station shall transmit... messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning".
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Because way back when long range radio was a plausible way for spies to communicate back to the homeland.
sseagull 5y ago
I am hoping they explained why. Most people who complain about the encryption regulation just completely disregard the reason for encryption in the first place (ie, all other regulations become unenforceable if encryption is allowed).
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Do they? Maybe we need to figure out the essential subset of regulations that preserves the most essential aspects of the system while still permitting encryption. I have no doubt it will be a huge mess and take a few tries to get right. We should get started already -- if we don't, HAM will die, and it will deserve to die.
  - sseagull 5y ago
    Mostly. Ham is meant for play, not as a primary means of communication or for commercial purposes. If everything is encrypted, how could you tell? How could you even tell that the users were licensed?
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      By not encrypting the call signs because unencrypted call signs aren't the problematic restriction. It's the content restrictions that are stifling in the modern world. Also: progress has changed the landscape. HFDF used to be difficult for the military but now it's easy for hobbyists, and not just in last-mile form, but in coordinated always-on infrastructure form. The regulations were not written with this in mind. With an active community this fact alone might obviate the need for many a regulation.
    - nyanpasu64 5y ago
      And I'm not broadcasting my legal name and mailing address so i can "play" with radio transmissions.
- edrxty 5y ago
  The unenforceable argument isn't really a thing. If we look at some common encryption standards, the call sign is in the clear as it has to be for routing. In the case where someone is swearing with their friends over an encrypted channel, it's just not a problem, no child will hear the swears without a quantum supercomputer. In the case where a business is illegally using ham bands to avoid paying license fees, they can already do this, nobody is actually checking. You can encrypt P25 on the bands all day long because nobody has radios that work with that digital mode and nobody will spend the time running signal analysis to figure out that A) it's P25, B) it's encrypted and C) where it's coming from. If it became rampant the FCC has the tools to very quickly figure out all of these things and if the broadcasts don't have a call sign and are coming from a business premises then it's obviously breaking the law anyway. If it could be a problem, it already would be. All the Chinese digital business radios support encryption now. We're just not allowed to use it because people are scared of bogeymen
detaro 5y ago
Don't conflate "it's extremely obviously not legal" with "people don't like it" (the latter camp you can always ignore, they fundamentally can't do that much in most cases except not support you. See e.g. the whining about pretty much any digital mode ever). But encryption on ham bands falls in the first bucket, which is a problem, and I doubt that's simply a "we need to advocate for changing it" matter. Fun fact: in parts of the world, you can transmit pretty much whatever you want on CB, nobody is stopping you from running encrypted digimodes there. And for slow transmissions, one can probably squeeze something through ISM bands, despite the limitations there. And you probably could develop a good mode on ham bands that has the foundations and does signatures but not encryption, and can switch to encrypted on other bands.

thereddaikon 5y ago

Unfortunately the FCC's rules around the Ham bands and digital modes ends up restricting a lot of potential for advancement and experimentation.

provobro 5y ago
That and anyone using this would need a ham radio license
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  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.
  - generalizations 5y ago
    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.
    - edrxty 5y ago
      It also completely prevents any interesting radio experimentation. There isn't anything left on that frontier that couldn't be conflated with encryption.
      - jmwilson 5y ago
        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.

rsync 5y ago

"Texting via APRS has been a thing for about 20 years." Yes, that's true. If, by "texting", you mean either: - A handheld radio attached to a laptop with a serial cable. - One of two (three ?) models ever produced that allowed you to key in APRS with T9 typing on a number pad. Yep, it's awesome.

hmrr 5y ago
Nailed it. It wasn’t and still isn’t useful or interesting because of the technical overhead of APRS reporting. Much prefer delving into the weak signal modes. JS8Call is interesting http://js8call.com/ http://js8call.com/ I wanted to write an iOS version of it. Just an iPad and a radio using the audio interface and you’re there. But I don’t have the time to do it.
unoti 5y ago
> If, by "texting", you mean either a handheld radio attached to a laptop with a serial cable, or one of two (three ?) models ever produced that allowed you to key in APRS with T9 typing... Actually, you can do a good amount of digital modes radio stuff using nothing more than a radio and a smartphone. For example, I myself have made a lot of contacts with people using PSK31 without a cable, using my iPhone speaker and mic near the radio handset. Digging into how these digital modes work is interesting intellectually. It's doable to implement the signal processing to implement these modes in code. And once you have one mode well-understood, it's also doable to come up with ideas on how to improve upon them and make new modes. Lots of HN readers would be able to do both of those things, and probably enjoy it. ("Modes" here means a way to communicate information over the radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amateur_radio_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amateur_radio_modes )

tdeck 5y ago

I've sent an SMS over the APRS gateway using nothing but a cheap handheld radio and the APRSdroid app. The app can emit audible data chirps, so you just compose your APRS message, hold your phone near the radio, and push the PTT button. Not very practical, but there's no custom hardware or connector required!

GekkePrutser 5y ago

And texting over AX.25 packet radio was a thing before that :) We used to have whole conversations on the local BBS and sometimes even in UI broadcast frames watched in the Rx monitor. Repeated a few times to compensate for loss of course. After all APRS is just a protocol atop AX.25. To be honest I never saw the fun in APRS. I don't want to broadcast my position all the time. And that's really all its used for, save the occasional 1:1 text message. When APRS became popular it took the whole packet group chat thing away. That was a bit like IRC. The old packet radio had much more to offer. It was amazing because the internet wasn't available to us at that time and BBSes required phone calls by the minute. Being online all day would cost more than a monthly wage. But I could be online and chat on packet all day for free. But because its speed never continued scaling up, it was just too slow for anything but APRS in the end. It's sad that this whole community has gone. I kinda hoped the Digi modes would bring something back but it's mainly just voice. International group voice which is in itself amazing but I miss the chats.

madengr 5y ago

There have been significant advancements, without the HN community involved.