6 ms·

Amateur Radio Universal Text Messaging/Contact Initiative

81 points by Cieplak 12y ago

Cieplak 12y ago
Also, https://www.tapr.org/pdf/DCC2009-RadioTextMessaging-WB4APR.pdf https://www.tapr.org/pdf/DCC2009-RadioTextMessaging-WB4APR.p...
drdaeman 12y ago
That's xkcd#927, as I get it?
- abruzzi 12y ago
  Not exactly. This isn't about creating a single protocol to replace the existing protocol, but instead recognizing that there are many existing protocols in use today, none of which seems likely to supplant all the others, and instead looking at ways to tie the systems together so I could send a message from my APRS radio to someone else using D-STAR. The bridges would happen behind the internet gateways to the systems so the RF side doesn't change, and no one needs to upgrade hardware.
superuser2 12y ago
This is cool, but since all forms of encryption are prohibited on amateur radio frequencies, not the most practical.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  (FYI, I believe encryption is forbidden, but digital signatures are ok)
  - a-priori 12y ago
    The rules vary by country. In the US, the FCC has prohibited amateur stations from using encryption intended to 'obscure the meaning' of a transmission. It's a grey area whether you're permitted to encrypt something for other purposes. This permits digital signatures, since they do not obscure anything. In Canada, the Radiocommunication Regulations only permit amateur stations to 'use a code or cipher that is not secret'. That prohibits any form of encryption unless you publish all keys involved in the transmission. By my reading of it, it also seems to prohibit creating a digital signature, since such a signature could be considered a code that is based on a key that is not public (otherwise anyone could forge your signature). I'm not sure if there's any official rulings on this.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  Encryption isn't necessary or even wanted in an emergency situation, which is when something like this comes into play. I've been a licensed amateur operator for 16 years, and during relays and training events we've always gone by the maxim that the most informative, clearest, and shortest message possible is the best in an emergency. Bringing amateur radio text messaging into the modern age is never going to be easy or 100% practical, but it can be done, and I think it would be great if it makes any headway.
- VLM 12y ago
  I didn't see anything in the article suggesting encryption.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Wow, I didn't expect that comment from you, someone who clearly remembers the Good Old Days, when the Internet was actually readable. Yes, the page isn't very beautiful, but it's still better than 90% of the Internet nowdays. It adheres to the right web design patterns [0] and it actually delivers some useful content without distracting. [0] http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Shitty HTML and {hard science, hardware hacking, electrical engineering, kernel development, other no-nonsense efforts} seem to go hand in hand. I see it as a social signal not unlike someone wearing a T-shirt and jeans amid a bunch of suits. To me it says "we're a lot more concerned with doing something amazing than with chasing the latest design fads."
  - morganvachon 12y ago
    This "retro" style is also an artifact of the average age of the amateur radio population in general, which skews 50+. I'm 37 and got into it young, and I'll be one of those "elmers" soon enough. Though I do sometimes cringe at the low-fi design of most ham sites, I take it as par for the course. They are often much more interested in getting their circuit and antenna designs (or ideas like the one in the linked article) out in the open, than making it pretty enough for the current college kids.
  - madengr 12y ago
    Ha ha, you know it's a ham web site when it has as many page counters, mouse pointer effects, and other such garbage as possible. Not knocking it, I'm an RF/MW EE and ham extra, it's just a given.
fidotron 12y ago
One of the coolest things about APRS is the ISS has a beacon on it, so you can bounce messages to and from space using not much more than a handheld and a yagi. The more extreme space bouncing is "moonbounce" where the moon is used as a communications satellite, but that's not APRS, and certainly not doable with small equipment.
chrissnell 12y ago
APRS messaging is awesome. In many cases, you can leverage iGates and the Internet-based APRS-IS backbone to move your messages from RF (radio) to Internet and then back on to RF at a remote location. I've built an APRS library for Go as part of a high-altitude balloon project that I've been working on. It can encode and decode APRS messages, ACK received messages, and send/receive APRS packets over AX.25/KISS (over serial or TCP/IP). The library is currently bundled with the balloon code but I plan on breaking it out into its own project soon. Code here: APRS library: https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprs https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprs AX.25 encoding/decoding: https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/ax25 https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/ax25 APRS-IS library (thanks to @dustin): https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprsis https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprsis
madengr 12y ago
Funny that people think Twitter is hot stuff, when APRS was instant, group-wise messaging, wirelessly, for many year prior.
- 01Michael10 12y ago
  What is the percentage of the population who can access APRS at this moment? 1%? Anyone who has a smartphone or a PC can access Twitter which is almost like 99% of people (in US) these days. Twitter can reach everyone on the Internet worldwide and APRS not so much... APRS is a system that has good uses but the Internet is revolutionary.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - XorNot 12y ago
    If we had smartphones with HF radio capability (or someone figured out how to reprogram the baseband to support it) then we'd be talking. EDIT: Though I suspect this isn't really practical. Are there any amateur bands near the GSM/CDMA bands?
    - dunmalg 12y ago
      GSM-450 is pretty much right there at the top end of the 70cm, and GSM-950 is right in the middle of 33cm, but here in the US at least the FCC is pretty nuts about insisting that stuff sold here is locked out of other devices' yards. They'd flip out if you tried to import an HT that could hit GSM freqs.
      - tlrobinson 12y ago
        > They'd flip out if you tried to import an HT that could hit GSM freqs. How did Chris Paget's IMSI catcher demo at Defcon a few years ago work then? http://blog.marinetelecom.net/2010/08/01/ham-radio-operator-chris-paget-kj6gcg-spoofs-as-900mhz-gsm-tower-and-15-phones-in-defcon-hacker-convention-log-onto-his-network/ http://blog.marinetelecom.net/2010/08/01/ham-radio-operator-...
nkeets 12y ago
If you are an iPhone user, there is a great app called PocketPacket: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocketpacket/id336500866?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocketpacket/id336500866?mt=8
VLM 12y ago
Spam problems? This will sound heretical but I simply don't want push mode text. What it fixes will be smaller than what it screws up. A quarter century ago I was heavily into ham radio packet BBS systems (and also node hopping or node dxing or whatever its called) and before internet spam was a problem we had pbbs spam. I remember the first cantor and siegel usenet spam in 93 or so... Anyway packet bbs spam was "its free to send the entire planet a forsale offer to sell my worn out beaten up dented HT for $5 less than a new one (plus $10 shipping). So why not. In fact why not send my sale notice every freaking 6 hours. For weeks." Or the ever popular "Rusty abused slightly bent rohn 25 tower section in the middle of nowhere, you ship it, $5 less than a new one" or "Willing to trade broken 1975 crystalized FM 2M mobile rig (worth about $10) for brand new icom IC781 (worth at the time about $8K), serious offers only pse 73". I actually read every PBBS post that went thru the forwarding network until 1991 or so when some categorization scheme was introduced and I could start ignoring forsale posts. Also traffic levels rose over the years. Another awesome one was back in the early ka9q nos era you'd have people spamming literally the entire planet because they couldn't bother reading the manual to figure out how to calculate an IP netmask, or for the entire era couldn't be bothered to glance at their radio's programming manual so why not just bug 100K people instead. Anyway, yeah, spam, I'm not imagining things would improve on the spam front, nor is there apparently any technological ideas to fix it. If you implement a tech thats free to push to a lot of people more or less anonymously, you're going to end up with a steaming pool of spam and no users soon enough. Finally a huge PBBS problem from a quarter century ago was the proverbial frequency cops would turn into a total PITA with respect to censorship. Its not enough that they felt the need to interpret the regs their way, but god help the souls of anyone else in the world who doesn't interpret the regs the same way. The little old lady busybodies of ham radio. Anyway their attempts to "fix" the spam problems tended to only make things worse. In fact they made things dramatically worse in some areas. Which from their own troll-ish viewpoint was likely a big win. So how is this push tech going to work around both direct and meta-level trolls, which were a huge problem 25 years ago.
- warble 12y ago
  Your concerns are well founded, but for point to point, especially combined with any identity fingerprinting (public keys, etc..) would have none of these problems. If your network is going to broadcast though to many recipients, shaming is about the only way to reduce this. Making sure the sender is who they say they are is very important as well (like it is with email), but I wouldn't suggest it would be successful in making it go away. Once you start identifying senders explicitly, then circles of nodes can be established that can limit entrance and or ostracise people who are annoying. You have to attach cost to messaging in order to senders to value their message, and other than charging a real amount of money which is probably not a good idea, cultural and social costs are very important in establishing trust and getting people to think more when they send. Fortunately humans have been doing this for 1000's of years, so if you put all the pieces there, it should work fairly naturally.

81 points by Cieplak 12y ago

Also, https://www.tapr.org/pdf/DCC2009-RadioTextMessaging-WB4APR.pdf https://www.tapr.org/pdf/DCC2009-RadioTextMessaging-WB4APR.p...

drdaeman 12y ago

That's xkcd#927, as I get it?

abruzzi 12y ago
Not exactly. This isn't about creating a single protocol to replace the existing protocol, but instead recognizing that there are many existing protocols in use today, none of which seems likely to supplant all the others, and instead looking at ways to tie the systems together so I could send a message from my APRS radio to someone else using D-STAR. The bridges would happen behind the internet gateways to the systems so the RF side doesn't change, and no one needs to upgrade hardware.

superuser2 12y ago

This is cool, but since all forms of encryption are prohibited on amateur radio frequencies, not the most practical.

tlrobinson 12y ago
(FYI, I believe encryption is forbidden, but digital signatures are ok)
- a-priori 12y ago
  The rules vary by country. In the US, the FCC has prohibited amateur stations from using encryption intended to 'obscure the meaning' of a transmission. It's a grey area whether you're permitted to encrypt something for other purposes. This permits digital signatures, since they do not obscure anything. In Canada, the Radiocommunication Regulations only permit amateur stations to 'use a code or cipher that is not secret'. That prohibits any form of encryption unless you publish all keys involved in the transmission. By my reading of it, it also seems to prohibit creating a digital signature, since such a signature could be considered a code that is based on a key that is not public (otherwise anyone could forge your signature). I'm not sure if there's any official rulings on this.
morganvachon 12y ago
Encryption isn't necessary or even wanted in an emergency situation, which is when something like this comes into play. I've been a licensed amateur operator for 16 years, and during relays and training events we've always gone by the maxim that the most informative, clearest, and shortest message possible is the best in an emergency. Bringing amateur radio text messaging into the modern age is never going to be easy or 100% practical, but it can be done, and I think it would be great if it makes any headway.
VLM 12y ago
I didn't see anything in the article suggesting encryption.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Wow, I didn't expect that comment from you, someone who clearly remembers the Good Old Days, when the Internet was actually readable. Yes, the page isn't very beautiful, but it's still better than 90% of the Internet nowdays. It adheres to the right web design patterns [0] and it actually delivers some useful content without distracting. [0] http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com
jjoonathan 12y ago
Shitty HTML and {hard science, hardware hacking, electrical engineering, kernel development, other no-nonsense efforts} seem to go hand in hand. I see it as a social signal not unlike someone wearing a T-shirt and jeans amid a bunch of suits. To me it says "we're a lot more concerned with doing something amazing than with chasing the latest design fads."
- morganvachon 12y ago
  This "retro" style is also an artifact of the average age of the amateur radio population in general, which skews 50+. I'm 37 and got into it young, and I'll be one of those "elmers" soon enough. Though I do sometimes cringe at the low-fi design of most ham sites, I take it as par for the course. They are often much more interested in getting their circuit and antenna designs (or ideas like the one in the linked article) out in the open, than making it pretty enough for the current college kids.
- madengr 12y ago
  Ha ha, you know it's a ham web site when it has as many page counters, mouse pointer effects, and other such garbage as possible. Not knocking it, I'm an RF/MW EE and ham extra, it's just a given.

fidotron 12y ago

One of the coolest things about APRS is the ISS has a beacon on it, so you can bounce messages to and from space using not much more than a handheld and a yagi. The more extreme space bouncing is "moonbounce" where the moon is used as a communications satellite, but that's not APRS, and certainly not doable with small equipment.

chrissnell 12y ago

APRS messaging is awesome. In many cases, you can leverage iGates and the Internet-based APRS-IS backbone to move your messages from RF (radio) to Internet and then back on to RF at a remote location. I've built an APRS library for Go as part of a high-altitude balloon project that I've been working on. It can encode and decode APRS messages, ACK received messages, and send/receive APRS packets over AX.25/KISS (over serial or TCP/IP). The library is currently bundled with the balloon code but I plan on breaking it out into its own project soon. Code here: APRS library: https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprs https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprs AX.25 encoding/decoding: https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/ax25 https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/ax25 APRS-IS library (thanks to @dustin): https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprsis https://github.com/chrissnell/GoBalloon/tree/master/aprsis

madengr 12y ago

Funny that people think Twitter is hot stuff, when APRS was instant, group-wise messaging, wirelessly, for many year prior.

01Michael10 12y ago
What is the percentage of the population who can access APRS at this moment? 1%? Anyone who has a smartphone or a PC can access Twitter which is almost like 99% of people (in US) these days. Twitter can reach everyone on the Internet worldwide and APRS not so much... APRS is a system that has good uses but the Internet is revolutionary.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- XorNot 12y ago
  If we had smartphones with HF radio capability (or someone figured out how to reprogram the baseband to support it) then we'd be talking. EDIT: Though I suspect this isn't really practical. Are there any amateur bands near the GSM/CDMA bands?
  - dunmalg 12y ago
    GSM-450 is pretty much right there at the top end of the 70cm, and GSM-950 is right in the middle of 33cm, but here in the US at least the FCC is pretty nuts about insisting that stuff sold here is locked out of other devices' yards. They'd flip out if you tried to import an HT that could hit GSM freqs.
    - tlrobinson 12y ago
      > They'd flip out if you tried to import an HT that could hit GSM freqs. How did Chris Paget's IMSI catcher demo at Defcon a few years ago work then? http://blog.marinetelecom.net/2010/08/01/ham-radio-operator-chris-paget-kj6gcg-spoofs-as-900mhz-gsm-tower-and-15-phones-in-defcon-hacker-convention-log-onto-his-network/ http://blog.marinetelecom.net/2010/08/01/ham-radio-operator-...

nkeets 12y ago

If you are an iPhone user, there is a great app called PocketPacket: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocketpacket/id336500866?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocketpacket/id336500866?mt=8

VLM 12y ago

Spam problems? This will sound heretical but I simply don't want push mode text. What it fixes will be smaller than what it screws up. A quarter century ago I was heavily into ham radio packet BBS systems (and also node hopping or node dxing or whatever its called) and before internet spam was a problem we had pbbs spam. I remember the first cantor and siegel usenet spam in 93 or so... Anyway packet bbs spam was "its free to send the entire planet a forsale offer to sell my worn out beaten up dented HT for $5 less than a new one (plus $10 shipping). So why not. In fact why not send my sale notice every freaking 6 hours. For weeks." Or the ever popular "Rusty abused slightly bent rohn 25 tower section in the middle of nowhere, you ship it, $5 less than a new one" or "Willing to trade broken 1975 crystalized FM 2M mobile rig (worth about $10) for brand new icom IC781 (worth at the time about $8K), serious offers only pse 73". I actually read every PBBS post that went thru the forwarding network until 1991 or so when some categorization scheme was introduced and I could start ignoring forsale posts. Also traffic levels rose over the years. Another awesome one was back in the early ka9q nos era you'd have people spamming literally the entire planet because they couldn't bother reading the manual to figure out how to calculate an IP netmask, or for the entire era couldn't be bothered to glance at their radio's programming manual so why not just bug 100K people instead. Anyway, yeah, spam, I'm not imagining things would improve on the spam front, nor is there apparently any technological ideas to fix it. If you implement a tech thats free to push to a lot of people more or less anonymously, you're going to end up with a steaming pool of spam and no users soon enough. Finally a huge PBBS problem from a quarter century ago was the proverbial frequency cops would turn into a total PITA with respect to censorship. Its not enough that they felt the need to interpret the regs their way, but god help the souls of anyone else in the world who doesn't interpret the regs the same way. The little old lady busybodies of ham radio. Anyway their attempts to "fix" the spam problems tended to only make things worse. In fact they made things dramatically worse in some areas. Which from their own troll-ish viewpoint was likely a big win. So how is this push tech going to work around both direct and meta-level trolls, which were a huge problem 25 years ago.

warble 12y ago
Your concerns are well founded, but for point to point, especially combined with any identity fingerprinting (public keys, etc..) would have none of these problems. If your network is going to broadcast though to many recipients, shaming is about the only way to reduce this. Making sure the sender is who they say they are is very important as well (like it is with email), but I wouldn't suggest it would be successful in making it go away. Once you start identifying senders explicitly, then circles of nodes can be established that can limit entrance and or ostracise people who are annoying. You have to attach cost to messaging in order to senders to value their message, and other than charging a real amount of money which is probably not a good idea, cultural and social costs are very important in establishing trust and getting people to think more when they send. Fortunately humans have been doing this for 1000's of years, so if you put all the pieces there, it should work fairly naturally.