We had a 5.29 repeater in the SF Bay area that took years to pull, but got pulled. It turned out the control operator had moved away! He said he'd left the repeater in someone else's care, but if that person existed they did not police the repeater.

If you care about this, start writing letters to FCC. They really do enforcement if pushed, the letter file is here.

It would be legal to send a message in the clear, with a digital signature along with it. You can't obscure the message.

It might make sense if governed properly, but the filer didn't propose any means of governance and didn't even know about HSMM-MESH when he wrote his proposal. He's a winlink node owner and his intent was to use GNUPG to encode text messages, and did not consider the abuses that could happen with TCP/IP. So, I am spending the whole day to write an FCC comment and hopefully fix this.

They get surplus business band radios, mostly. One reason is that the Federal Government has required several frequency, bandwidth, and mode changes of municipal radio users, so almost-new radios that were too wide or didn't run APCO-25 became available at low prices.

For the most part, commercial radios are really overpriced. It is not unusual for a police car transceiver to come in at $5000. FCC certified GMRS radios seem rather overpriced for their performance. There are cheap chinese radios for land-mobile which are not certified for GMRS, these are really just broad-banded ham radios.

I have worked really hard to fix that D-STAR issue. See FreeDV and Codec2. We expect to have that on VHF/UHF soon.

Actually, it would be a simple matter to gateway https back to http. And since the rule prohibits encryption for the purpose of obscuring information, authentication through encryption is OK. Your password need not be transmitted in the clear. Just don't obscure the message traffic.

In general, though, the web doesn't belong on ham radio just because it's private use. There are lots of other services for private communications. There is also of course the fact that advertising isn't allowed on ham radio, because the rules prohibit commercial use.

OK, since you are not interested in supporting censorship, I will give you some uncensored material.

You snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of eldeberry! I fart in your general direction!

Now, that really contributed to the conversation, didn't it?

It's not dead. Actually, there are more hams today in the US than at any time in history.

But if you want to kill it, making it just like the internet might be a good way.

A lot of us don't consider swear words useful traffic. Just annoying immaturity. And we can send any useful traffic that we don't want to hide. Stuff you want to hide belongs on the ample resources already provided for that.

As it happens, you can authenticate using encryption and have digital signatures within the current rules. You just can't use encryption to obscure the message.

We really like that it's not like the internet.

How can we tell that an encrypted message is an emergency communications drill, or anything else?

Don Rolph, the filer, wasn't even aware of HSMM-MESH before I introduced him to it yesterday. So, he missed a whole lot of implications that he's only discovering this morning.

Hi Nimbius,

Actually, your ham license does not grant you "rights to the airwaves". It grants you the right to operate within a shared resource which is held for the public interest.

One problem with allowing encryption is that it would allow you to usurp that shared resource for a private communication to which nobody but your in-group is admitted. How would you like it if you were locked off of the air by other folks doing it?

Good luck with your upgrade. It might be a good time to read Part 97, especially the justification for the Amateur service right at the start.

Thanks

Bruce Perens K6BP (Extra Class license, back when there was a 20 WPM code test, thank goodness you won't have to take one)

And when to demonstrably harms society?
And I mean demonstrated at a scientific level, not some opinion based on some old book.