Instant messaging on the SAFE Network?

That will sadly work only until the space would be destroyed by cheapest crap radios that have “more power” and doesnt respect anybody else, because that is what BFU wants.

Oh absolutely. Anarchy is not the best solution here, which is why bureaucracies like the FCC were created in the first place. It is just that these regulations were put in place before the SDR revolution, so they need to be adjusted. Many rules have been in place since the days of vacuum tubes.

For unlicensed devices and users, government should still regulate transmit power, bandwidth, and modulation for particular bands to prevent destructive interference. They should not regulate what data is transmitted and whether or not it is encrypted. The biggest problem is that unlicensed spectrum where this is possible is extremely small and is mostly in the UHF bands where signals are attenuated by any physical object in the line of sight. We need more bandwidth. So I’m saying open up everything, or almost everything, and take advantage of all the advances in SDR, beam forming, etc. FCC certification of wireless devices is already a big enough hurdle that just about everything you buy today follows the rules already. And if it doesn’t it won’t connect to other nodes anyway, so why bother? The only real knob you can turn is transmit power, but as you go up higher in frequency where your highest data rates can be found, power becomes less important than antenna gain. And if your device already automatically adjusts its mode of operation to find the optimal band for the propogation characteristics you are encountering, that vast majority of people won’t bother. You’ll always have people causing destructive interference, it is the role of the government here to ensure access to this finite resource.

Licensed users should have all the same abilities on all the same bands as unlicensed users, except there would be much higher limits on transmit power and the ability to experiment with modulation schemes and bandwidth. Then getting a license has a real benefit and you can use knowledge to improve your QoR.

So I see this as an optimization problem. Today’s users of spectrum aren’t using it efficiently. With our current technology this can be addressed. The rules just need changed to enable it.

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… Same here and the license is on my bucket list but didn’t manage to prioritise it yet :expressionless:
… Always so many things to do just too little time and money…

Those ham radios aint cheap are they?? Used to love using a CB back in the early 90s… it’s how me and my mates over north Scotland use to keep in touch pre-web < £70 to get totally set up, and still a similar price for that kit now. But the HF stuff is :money_with_wings:

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Yeah - I guess there’s always different levels with different prices but the obviously cool setups immediately were clearly 4 digit when I looked into it =O

Anyway - first the license part… (in Germany I think it’s roughly 1500 questions you should be able to answer… ofc just a small selection in the test and not all of them need to be answered correctly… Nonetheless I wasn’t brave enough to tackle this one yet =D )

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Is it possible to send encrypted messages or DBC transactions over Ham Radios or even AM frequencies?

Unfortunately it’s against the law. I’m not sure who is permitted to use encrypted radio comms. There is Morse, and “packet radio”, but radio hams are not allowed to use encryption.

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Now what if the (small) encrypted message is turned into english words. Is there a regulation on the words spoken making sense?

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I’m guessing most other countries follow similar standards, but this is the FCC regulation:

§ 97.113 Prohibited transmissions.
(a) No amateur station shall transmit:
… messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, … or false or deceptive messages, signals or identification.

The International Radio Regulations say this about inter-country communcations:

25.2A 1A) Transmissions between amateur stations of different countries shall not be
encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning, except for control signals exchanged between
earth command stations and space stations in the amateur-satellite service. (WRC-03)

The FCC follows the same control/authentication carve out for remote station control.

Its pretty terrible. I honestly think they would have done the same to the internet, but encryption escaped into the wild and onto every PC before the bureaucrats had time to react.

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That would disallow the idea of using words to transmit an encrypted message.

Like your own personal numbers station!

Other thing to remember is that it is trivially easy to directionally locate ham radio transmissions.

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Looks like there is a lot of fun to be had with this…

Also the Hackrf looks awesome. Might need to add it to the birthday list!

https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/one/

This is an excellent point. A legal requirement for all communication to make sense or a ban on secret/encrypted/unintelligible communication can never be distinguished from a ban on e.g. abstract poetry. Some get it, some don’t.

A requirement for everything to make sense to the censors would also make most scientific discourse illegal. The cops sitting there with the censor’s black marker, or the judges passing out sentences, will certainly never be able to make sense of all scientific discussions.

“Making sense” is a feeling. A ban on not making sense is a ban on making the censors feel insecure. But the practice of banning “foreign” languages in e.g. schoolyards is certainly nothing new. Neither is the persecution of “intellectuals” or “the intelligentsia”, words often used synonymously with “Jew”, by the way.

We now have hoards going after scholars who use “big” or “fancy” words, and certain politicians egging them on, claiming they themselves “tell it like it is”. These same hoards often enjoy “speaking in tongues” in their churches.

If a law requiring all communication to make logical sense were consistently enforced, a lot of politicians would be in big trouble.

Morphophonemics

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Its a rule on intent. Are you intending to encrypt/use code, or being open. Not the words used

Obviously IANAL, but prosecuting people for assumed intent, i.e. thoughts, seems very dangerous to me.

It is but doing it too often creates a pattern that one can determine intent. Not always but people are expected to follow the rules even if unenforceable.

Yep, definitely so. This sentence gives little room for using a systematic transformation of the language:

You’re not wrong, but it is part of judicial process. Establishing intent (which perhaps could degrade to assuming) plays a big role in many cases and rulings. The importance of the process on how to establish it, naturally varies between systems, but I would say that the most evolved ones do put a lot of care into that process.


Btw, I thought this was an interesting thing, slightly related:

915 Mhz band

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@Sascha, your cartoon is hilarious.

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