Rebooting a Hobby: The Death and Rebirth of Amateur Radio.

[janoc]

America doesn't require a gun to have a name attached, but it does require that you have a gun permit with your name on it if you want to carry it (let's ignore stuff like shotguns or states allowing open carry for simplicity).

There is no need to make an exception for states which allow unlicensed open or concealed carry.  Federal law effectively outlaws *all* unlicensed carry in every state through the Gun Free School Zones Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_School_Zones_Act_of_1990#Carrying

I didn't want to go into the minutiae of gun licensing as that is really beside the point. Furthermore, the US gun laws are pretty much an outlier in the rest of the civilized world, with other countries requiring a permit/license to purchase or posses a gun already, not only to carry it.

[janoc]

It is common sense, that you are not allowed to transmit on aviation frequencies, but if you are not educated, you don't even know which frequency bands are used by aviation!

I find it kind of worrying how easily one can buy a Baofeng (or similar) radio with up to 8W (!) without any proof of amateur licensing. Just head on to eBay, Amazon, etc. and for 50 Euro (often less) you get a radio which can potentialyl harm other transmissions.

Naturally state agencies can track and locate people misusing those radios, but at the rate and quantities they are being sold, I wonder if there is enough manpower to do so.

Well, just look at the situation with the "drone laws". If people weren't doing stupid things with them, there wouldn't now be laws banning the use of drones in a lot of places, requiring registration, banning cameras, etc.

The same with laser pointers vs airplanes/helis. People know that it is both illegal and dangerous to shine lasers at planes, but they still do it - the chance of getting caught is minimal unless  you are so stupid as to shine it at a police helicopter ...

Regarding illegal transmissions in HAM bands - in fact, most of the fines and prosecutions for illegal interference or pirate transmissions are triggered by other HAMs triangulating the source and reporting it, not government agencies. They simply don't have neither time nor resources to proactively police HAM bands (or any bands - the interference vans go out only when someone reports a problem).

For example, in Slovakia it used to be often truckers using illegal CB radios capable of SSB modulation (only FM and 4W was allowed back then) and often equipped with amplifiers where 1kW output was nothing uncommon. You can imagine what that was doing in the 28MHz HAM band ...

So while the licensing is not a silver bullet, it at least keeps the worst excesses in check.

[zl2wrw]

[SNIP]
What should be changed is the limitation of only being allowed to send messages in clear. This prevents *any* Internet communication over amateur radio frequencies, as most Internet services are now encrypted. In the remaining amateur radio bands, people should be able to send whatever kind of data they are working on, even ecrypted one, as digital data is per se a form of encryption.
[SNIP]

Quoting from my amateur radio licence here in New Zealand "Communications must not be encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning...".
My take on this is that digital data encoding (RTTY, AX.25, PSK31, ARDOP, etc) is just fine, provided that you are not hiding the meaning of your message (anyone with the right know-how can listen in) - however, using TLS or AES etc to encrypt your message so that only a select few who have the encryption key can decode it is definitely not ok (so no HTTPS over packet radio). If you are developing a brand new digital protocol, merely publishing a protocol description on your web site and or writing a descriptive article to a ham radio magazine (NZART Break-In, ARRL QST, RSGB Radcomm, etc) is probably sufficient to satisfy "not encoded for the purpose of obscuring the meaning".

Please note that this does not preclude the use of authentication (signed messages), were the message is sent "in the clear" with an attached hash (eg HMAC) where anyone can read the message, and can use your public key to verify that the message was signed with your private key, but only the holder of the private key (you) can generate the hash (signature).

My understanding is that the ban on encryption comes about from some countries concerns about spies masquerading as hams. If hams were permitted to send encrypted messages, then spies could pose as hams and exchange encrypted messages with HQ - this would probably result in some countries simply banning amateur radio, or banning their hams from communicating with other countries.

[janoc]

My understanding is that the ban on encryption comes about from some countries concerns about spies masquerading as hams. If hams were permitted to send encrypted messages, then spies could pose as hams and exchange encrypted messages with HQ - this would probably result in some countries simply banning amateur radio, or banning their hams from communicating with other countries.

That and there are also other concerns.

The definition of amateur radio service explicitly disallows commercial traffic (connection to Internet would certainly qualify as "commercial") and also requires that anyone operating a transmitter must be licensed. Which is almost certainly not satisfied if an arbitrary remote Internet server is triggering data transmissions over the air. (see: http://life.itu.int/radioclub/rr/art25.htm )

How tightly is this enforced varies from country to country, e.g. in Slovakia this has been a huge no-no (and also partially thanks to that the HAMs were stuck with 1200Bd/9600Bd AX25 packet radio) while in Slovenia they were/are running high speed network with public internet gateways where you could do things like download e-mail or even browse websites.

Basically, if you need encryption or Internet, you are not doing amateur radio and should use commercial services instead. HAM radio is explicitly defined as not being a replacement or competitor  for them. In fact, this is one very important reason why the amateurs managed to keep the spectrum allocations they have, in the congested HF bands - the moment commercial traffic on the bands was allowed, there would be a huge pressure to reallocate them fully to commercial services (broadcasting, military, etc.) and there would be no more amateur radio. The commercial users are very heavily pushing on this, because the HF bands have worldwide reach and the 40 and 20m bands are very attractive from this point of view.

So the ban on encryption on HAM bands is the least of your problems, really.

On the other hand, there is nothing that prevents HAMs from building computer networks over HAM bands, even using TCP/IP, as long as the above is respected, e.g.: http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ or the European HAMNET: https://www.tapr.org/pdf/DCC2014-TheEuropeanHAMNET-DG8NGN.pdf