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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.
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."
Because the rest can just use steganography and encryption as usual.
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... 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.
I thought the capitalized HAM was supposed to an idiot newbie mistake. Doesn't every ham like to explain that the word is not an acronym for anything?
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.
While you are exactly correct in this assessment, the legality is currently very fuzzy and is only used in a couple specific circumstances. For instance, if you were to use 'insert band here' and 'insert digital transmission method here' to establish an SSH connection with computer system hooked up to a radio, you would likely end up being in violation of multiple rules. For instance, anybody stumbling across the signal would not be able to decode it. They will likely figure out which method of digital encoding you are using fairly easily but would be unable to decode the contents. Even if you have the keys posted on a website somewhere, who will know where to get them? Further, you must still identify yourself roughly every 10 minutes. That means you either break your connection and transmit in the clear every ten minutes, or you attach it to your packets... Only the first method would really be viable as in the second, your callsign is again, obfuscated. People in my club have gone back and forth on this as a side project to setup a packet BBS in the local area. What we have determined is that it is fine as long as we don't encrypt anything and manage the system locally. Anything else just gets too convoluted and fuzzy in regards to the regulations. Further conversations on the topic brought up the same points I did above and we have come to the conclusion that it is for the best to keep encryption out of Amateur radio with only a very few small, specific instances.
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.
I stopped fighting that fight a long time ago and just roll with it. Besides, while it not be an acronym it helps differentiate from the bacon variety. I usually leave qrz.com feeling hungry.
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.
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.
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?
Indeed. It's "ham" (or better, "radio amateur"), just like it's not the INTERNET or SLASHDOT.