Agreed-- at least relaxing the restriction for UHF/SHF signals on a "secondary usage" basis (traffic must yield to plaintext). Potentially with with reduced pow

Agreed-- at least relaxing the restriction for UHF/SHF signals on a "secondary usage" basis (traffic must yield to plaintext). Potentially with with reduced power (say 100w) or minimum directionality, but I think a 'secondary usage' would be sufficient. Without doing so virtually all non-HF experimentation will continue to be deflected onto the ISM bands and we will lose our allocations through disuse. So long as identification is still decodable, spectrum usage can be managed. It's sufficient to prohibit commercial usage you don't need plaintext to do so. The old threat of tow trucks and cab services moving onto ham-bands had long since been mooted by ubiquitous cellular, but even if it weren't any significant commercial usage will eventually have a whistleblower. Usage that is obscure enough to not be vulnerable to whistleblowers could also be hidden just as well in "plaintext" traffic that was really uncrackable steganography. As it stands you can't even lawfully log into your own personal systems over amateur radio even if you take the unreasonable steps of using specially modified software to authenticate-but-not-encrypt because inevitably some third party will send a message to you via the internet that contains some naughty words that aren't permitted over the radio. Without relaxing the encryption rules, innovative radio usage like meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/ https://meshtastic.org/) will continue to be pushed onto ISM bands where (1) they're still technically unlawful because the homebrew hardware is not type-accepted (amateur bands are the ONLY place where homebrew intentional radiators are allowed!) and (2) where the band choices, power limit, and EIRP limits are detrimental to full exploration of the possibilities. Besides, the FCC has long allowed proprietary, license fee bearing, patent encumbered digital modes. These are very close to encryption in terms of their ability to lock others out of ham comms, and have frequently been used by amateur radio groups to establish "lid free" communications channels. (Because most of the more irritating people aren't technically sophisticated enough to adopt some new mode without help, and people won't help them...). The rules as they stand punish honest people who follow the intent and spirit of the rule in favor of people willing to just ignore the rules (including operating unlawful devices in ISM bands), willing to use stego, or willing to use obscure protocols to achieve the same ends that they'd otherwise achieve with encryption. It blocks modern networking by disallowing standard internet-grade software use with radio since all of it has integral encryption which generally can't be disabled to prevent downgrading and cross domain attacks in contexts where the encryption is needed -- or because in some cases the protocols are designed in such a way that authentication without encypherment isn't possible. 73s, NT4TN