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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.
Because the rest can just use steganography and encryption as usual.
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You can now. Just stick to the allocated ISM bands (eg WiFi).
What you can't do now is build your own transmitter without a ham license. This obviously is to prevent interference to other services.
The philosophy is simple. License the Radio or License the Operator. The Amateur Operator has passed sufficient technical barrier to ensure that they won't do stupid things and cause interference.
There is one catch however. The Amateur License excluded commercial operations. To do that you need a commercial license.
The amateur license is primarily for self education.
... 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.
Different modes are not encryption. That's like saying "hmmm i can only do sideband so that means i cant listen to AM". Crypto is not at all allowed on the ham bands and likely never will be. Phase Shift Keying is a mode of transmission and PSK31 is a standard that uses it. Also, WSJT isn't a mode, it is a program.
There are many encrypted ham standards, PSK31 WSPR, WSJT, MAP65, Hellscriber, etc, etc.
Umm, unless I am managing to completely misunderstand something, those are not encryption, those are simply digital signals rather than analog.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
EM spectrum is a scarce resource, shared between all the community. If one person fills up the spectrum with high powered broadcasts, they deny others the use of that spectrum for potentially more valuable resources. You cannot buy or manufacture more electromagnetic spectrum: what we have is all there is, and more people want it than than there is space for. Would you be happy if, for example, I knocked out all WiFi and cell signals for ten miles around my house? Would you be happy if I overloaded the frequencies used by the emergency services? Would you be happy if I filled the TV frequencies with hardcore porn or a terrorist manifesto?
You have to be a sociopath not to expect there to be some sharing of limited resources.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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 entirely agree one should supervise children. Children should only be watching safe channels, and adults should supervise them. But your proposal is to invade the safe channel - to replace Cartoon Network with snuff movies. This is not putting porn where the unsupervised can find it, this is forcing porn into areas where reasonable people would not expect to find it.
It is not "children might", it is "you are forcing on children". The difference between consensual sex and rape, the difference between guns in self defence and firing at random in a shopping mall.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
"Crypto is not at all allowed on the ham bands"
That's not true. Part 97 prohibits "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning." If crypto were used, not for obscuring meaning, but to prevent unauthorized access (e.g. for a "telecommand" application), it would not run afoul of the regs.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The amateur license is primarily for self education.
As a US general class amateur radio licensee, I will gladly confirm that you called out one of the primary objectives of the international amateur radio service with the other being emergency communications. I got mine out of pure curiosity and it never ceases to provide something new on a regular basis to scratch my head over.
You can on the unlicensed ISM spectrum bands for wifi, CB radio, those FRS bubble pack radios, but you're legally limited to very low power operation. Radio licensing is largely about safety with regards to high power transmissions since RF can burn and kill you (it is a form of electricity), and slackjawed mouth breathing fools have a tendency for "hold my beer, watch this" moments.
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'm a new ham, looking into installing an antenna in my back yard. I have kids.
The impedance at the center of a half wave dipole is low, say 70 ohms or so if it's the right length for the transmission, but at the ends it is really high. 100W (small beer for a ham operator) into 70 ohms is 80 volts or so in the middle of the antenna. At the end of the antenna the impedance is very high, say 4000 ohms, the same 100W is then 630 volts or so.
The impedance can be much more, the power can be much, much more, these are moderate numbers for RF that can be generated from a small radio. That's one of the reasons the antennas are hoisted into the trees, it's not just for propagation.
Nullius in verba
No, it's NOT ENCRYPTION. It's ENCODING. I can go out, buy a DSTAR radio, and copy your conversations, without needing any encryption key from you. Encryption would be where I need a pin or other code to decode your message successfully, where not having that information from you would prevent me from monitoring your transmissions. DSTAR, DMR/MOTOTRBO, Codec2, etc., are all encodings, just like PSK31. I can't verbally copy PSK31, but I can buy a device (laptop) to decode your messages without further input from you, so it's not ENCRYPTION.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
Well, it didn't help that the guy who filed that petition didn't bother to read the HIPAA laws, nor understand that HIPAA laws do not apply to ham radio operators. He was seeking a solution to a made-up problem.