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I was talking about commercial activity. Flouting the rules on that would be a bad idea. We need to change the rules, not flout them. The core idea "individual

I was talking about commercial activity. Flouting the rules on that would be a bad idea. We need to change the rules, not flout them. The core idea "individual accountability and exclusionary property rights are complementary mechanisms for sharing spectrum" is probably eternal, but HAM mindshare is sill stuck in the days when building kit and studying for a license was worth it to access the glorious nerd forum in the Earth's Ionosphere, and the internet flat out replaced that. HAM could reinvent itself as an on-ramp for ambitious young'uns with big ideas to challenge stodgy incumbent telecom if it wanted to, but right now it's coasting on the social groups that were formed back when its value proposition made sense and it will stay on a downward trajectory until it fixes this. Telecom and its problems are bigger than ever. This is HAM's key back into the land of value-prop-positive activities. If you plug a broadband antenna into a spectrum analyzer and wave it around, you see that almost all of the action is crammed into the lightly-licensed "trash containment" bands. That's interesting. We probably have the fixed vs flexible allocation wrong. Does 10% of the traffic need 90% of the spectrum? Probably not, now that technology has advanced past fixed-band dumb endpoints. We need to slowly unwind that. 6G was a good start, but the ISM rules mean that we are going to get slightly faster wifi, not some wild and wacky mesh network thing that tries to offer "internet sans video" for $5/mo or whatever.

livueta 2y ago
Re ISM band usefulness: yeah. I grudgingly admit that the propagation characteristics of HF and probably even VHF aren't a great match for the ISM governance model, but at least everywhere I've ever used radios, UHF HAM bands are as dead as a doornail and don't (fine, generally) propagate far enough for small numbers of negligent users to create major problems for large amounts of users. Take some 400mhz UHF and make it ISM. 902-928mhz ISM has a ton of great stuff like LoRa going on, but access to 400mhz bands would be a huge shot in the arm to the practical usability of projects like Meshtastic without significant risks to the general usability of that chunk of spectrum. Another interesting thing about the history of protocol development in ISM bands is how the need to cope with noise/overuse/other forms of spectrum degradation has spurred enormous advances in encoding and signal-processing techniques, quite contrary to the initial expectation of useless garbage dumping zone bands.
bityard 2y ago
Are you saying that the ham bands should be opened up for commercial exploitation? Because if so, I recommend cracking open a radio history book and reading up on the reasons why those bands were intentionally set aside for non-commercial use by the FCC in the very beginning. Also, HAM is not an acronym.
- jjulius 2y ago
  > Although not an acronym, it is often written as "HAM" in capital letters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio See also: the many uses of "HAM" throughout this thread.

livueta 2y ago

Re ISM band usefulness: yeah. I grudgingly admit that the propagation characteristics of HF and probably even VHF aren't a great match for the ISM governance model, but at least everywhere I've ever used radios, UHF HAM bands are as dead as a doornail and don't (fine, generally) propagate far enough for small numbers of negligent users to create major problems for large amounts of users. Take some 400mhz UHF and make it ISM. 902-928mhz ISM has a ton of great stuff like LoRa going on, but access to 400mhz bands would be a huge shot in the arm to the practical usability of projects like Meshtastic without significant risks to the general usability of that chunk of spectrum. Another interesting thing about the history of protocol development in ISM bands is how the need to cope with noise/overuse/other forms of spectrum degradation has spurred enormous advances in encoding and signal-processing techniques, quite contrary to the initial expectation of useless garbage dumping zone bands.

bityard 2y ago

Are you saying that the ham bands should be opened up for commercial exploitation? Because if so, I recommend cracking open a radio history book and reading up on the reasons why those bands were intentionally set aside for non-commercial use by the FCC in the very beginning. Also, HAM is not an acronym.

jjulius 2y ago
> Although not an acronym, it is often written as "HAM" in capital letters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio See also: the many uses of "HAM" throughout this thread.