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UK Ham Radio Reg Plans To Drop 15 min Callsign Interval and Allow Encryption
First time accepted submitter product_bucket writes A consultation published by the UK Radio Regulator Ofcom seeks views on its plan to remove the mandatory 15 minute callsign identifier interval for amateur radio licensees. The regulator also intends to permit the use of encryption by a single volunteer emergency communications organization. The consultation is open until 20th October, and views are sought by interested parties.
Guess that'll automatically be RAYNET then. Would have been nice to have encryption for a wider audience to play and experiment with.
All that ham nerd stuff was probably meaningful once, but is there a single good reason why people can't broadcast whatever they want? I mean, sure, stick within allocated frequencies, don't bleed over other ones etc, but check out the rules - they're hilarious. Are we still worried about political subversion and Russian spies?
Some HAMs in the US tried to get the FCC to allow encryption on HAM radio about a year or so ago under the guise of HIPAA... that did not go very far. Although, it would be nice to ID every 15 minutes instead of the current 10 in the US.
"No, but understanding is not required, only obedience."
... they just called it CB.
In theory a great idea, in practice you got a load if halfwit teenagers and other dimwits who had nothing to say keying up over people trying to have a sensible conversation and generally causing a nuisance. What with them and the people who seemed to think playing music from a crappy cassette tape into the mic suddenly turned their bedroom rig into Kiss FM eventually made CB unusable and it died (in the UK anyway) apart from the occasional diehard and some truckers.
These are the least interesting aspects of the consultation.
1) The "how often you have to identify" thing is nearly irrelevant - it's just turned now from set occasions to the vague, and therefore hard to enforce, must-always-be-identifiable. But a few people on long ragchews didn't quite stick to the rules, while almost everyone else does. Those who continue abusing the bands will carry on not identifying anyway. As for digital/data encoding, that could always announce its callsign automatically at whatever interval - it's not like you have to do it in Morse/voice anymore, unless you want to;
2) RAYNET are nowhere near as comprehensive as US amateur radio emergency support. I don't even understand why they've been given the privilege of encryption, but I guess there's something at work here I dont know - anybody?
Now, the other shit, some of which is far more interesting:
a) The "release" (this is newspeak for "private give-away") of bands 2350-2390 Mhz and 3410-3475 MHz. This is a substantial loss of amateur allocation to the wireless leeches. This isn't being consulted on, but it's a harsh reminder of the position of the ham, and a reason for the concession in b);
b) The allocation without NoV of spectrum in the 470 kHz and 5 MHz bands. I remember a decade or so ago when 470 kHz ham radio work was pioneering, and it's nice to see it go mainstream;
c) They're updating wording on fees but STILL not charging for the licence. In Soviet Britain, this is a bad thing, because a government department which gets rich from some set of stakeholders is one which listens to those stakeholders;
d) They're making it slightly harder to transmit if you've been convicted under the WT Act. Since ham radio is the last bastion of long distance electronic free speech, any moves to make it harder to transmit are worth keeping an eye on. These amendments consider fairly specific circumstances, fortunately;
e) A few babbles about call sign usage and re-use, which please those who like picking apart (genuine, if mostly just bureaucratic) problems with license wording;
f) Some minor if decent clarifications supporting reciprocal usage and transmitting from multiple locations (direction-finding exercise, etc.). This shows that the licensing body is paying attention to detail about how licenses are actually used by hobbyists, which is pleasing.
As an Amateur Radio operator, I have mixed feelings on this. For one, being able to use encryption would be pretty neat. Being halfway around the world and being able to have a secure conversation with my wife (also a licensed HAM) would be awesome. On the other hand, the hand allocations we have right now are already pretty small and allowing encryption is just begging for more pirates to show up and splatter all over the bands. An earlier comment was right on the mark that part of the reason us HAMs study so much for our licenses is that it allows us to experiment with our radios. People who have not done this level of study will more than likely have spurious emissions or cause interference. Just look at the CB frequencies right now. When the license requirement went away for CB, the band was 'okay' for a while. Now though, you have guys cranking out thousands of watts and splattering all over the place. On the other hand I know how to transmit a 1500 watt signal while keeping all that power limited to within 100 Hz. As for the comment asking how relevant Amateur Radio is, I would say that it is still extremely relevant. Most advances in radio communications both on the HF and the microwave frequencies for the last 100 years have been done by amateur radio operators. Lets not forget the constant tinkering we do with our antennas and coming up with new antenna designs, several of which are now in common commercial use.
So you want to subject children to hardcore porn?
Children would not exist were it not for a process whose depiction would be considered hardcore porn.
children are different
The special pleading fallacy can be avoided by describing how the difference is relevant in a particular context.
You cannot buy or manufacture more electromagnetic spectrum
But you can use the spectrum you have far more efficiently, with more directional antennas, more efficient channel modulation, spatial multiplexing through MIMO, etc. Legacy modes used in the AM and FM broadcast bands, for example, are horribly inefficient compared to modern digital modes.
and its called Dstar, only way to "legally" decrypt it is to buy decryption module from DVSI or whole radio from Icom.
Dstar is a proprietary, patented and closed protocol using another patented and closed vocoder (ambe).
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
OK, if OFCOM wants to keep this within the UK, I really have a hard time caring. However, any ham radio activities that transmit signals outside the borders of the UK should be unencrypted.
They CAN be encoded, with well known codes and modulation, but encryption is right out.
The US FCC looked at this about a year ago and most of the response came to that conclusion.
Allowing encryption on the ham bands sounds like a great idea, especially to slashdotters, because we all really love the idea of our government not being able to listen to everything we say. Unfortunately, there are a lot of governments who really don't like that idea. The only reason Ham operators in your favorite semi-free country of choice can talk to people in much less free parts of the world is because of the ban on encryption. If the UK allows encrypted signals over ham, and a UK ham operator can get signals hitting all over the world, you better believe the Iranian, Chinese, and all other heavy-handed governments that make no effort to hide their censorship efforts will start rounding up ham equipment because who knows what sort of ideas are streaming in from the UK.
Global encryption bans are the only thing allowing ham to operate in large portions of the country. All it takes is one country lifting that ban to spoil it for everyone. There are plenty of other avenues for those who want to encrypt their communications.
.. The regulator also intends to permit the use of encryption
Why bother?, they already spout a lot of incomprehensible garbage at each other...
I have an APRS transceiver sending telemetry from my cottage; mostly so I know whether I need to get in the car and drive out there to address either water in the basement or pipes about to freeze... Soon I'll be able to send commands and receive responses (like raise the temperature because I'm en-route, or turn on the irrigation system, or whatever)... I don't want any old shmuck to mess with my stuff so I thought about encrypting the text in my APRS message with a pre-shared key and calling it a day... Does that qualify as verboten?
The "Children are are born aware of sexuality" argument is one that is usually only made by pedophiles to justify their child rape.
Tuning the HAM bands you seem to only encounter old geezers (70 years or older) that go on and on and on about, well, nothing really. They talk to the same (local, mostly) people, and have been doing that for the last few decades. Nothing left to say, but still saying it.
Newly starting amateurs are actively shunned. If you're not part of the incrowd, they don't want to talk to you. And certainly not about anything HAM related.
It's ridiculous.