But that's a bizarre argument. Many uses other than encryption might also do this (lets say, hypothetically, that it was indeed a Public Radio Entropy Source)

So, we're going to take an empty channel, filled with random noise, and replace it with a transmission filled with random noise! Which will be less random than what we started with.

I'm not impressed yet :-)

Go on believing that steganography can't be detected. I'd rather be able to watch you, if necessary, than not.

To say that you're not using real sources would be an understatement. The middle one is someone's entertaining list of things that they think will go extinct, offered more as comedy than anything else. The first is a 7-year-old interview with someone in Quatar, which just got Ham Radio around then, who offers no sources to substantiate his statement. And you seem to be assuming that the retirees cited by ARRL will all die and not be replaced, and the emergency groups will find something else to do, which makes no sense. But you are also relying on ARRL which has not presented any substantive survey on this issue.

QRZ, unlike ARRL, operates an online callbook, and thus can actually count the number of hams in many nations. Their survey is here. You need something with at least that much data to be taken seriously.

So, you're proposing that since we might not be able to detect steganography, that we allow all possible use of encryption. However, the first example would have to be well enough hidden that it would not make significant use of a scarce resource, and thus that resource would not be denied to others. The second example would potentially lock lots of people out of many frequencies that would be in exclusive use for private communications.

Also, don't assume that we can not detect steganography and intruders in general. There is a very active community that does just that.

he petitioner is not asking for encryption to be allowed for all traffic on all ham bands, as you have suggested at your site

With good governance, it would go that way. With bad governance, any abuser will be able to claim that they were performing a test or drill of emergency communications, and we will have no way to prove otherwise.

Since the petitioner was completely unaware of HSMM-MESH until yesterday, he didn't consider all of the possible abuses, and did not propose any governance means to deal with them.

Your first example would not have violated any rules, although the other operator might have died of boredom and, if deliberate, that would be murder :-) . Your second example would have if it were an encrypted message rather than just rubbing your fingers over the top row of the keyboard.

Unfortunately I think you would have to learn a bit more about the issue before you are able to mount a cogent objection.

Thanks

Bruce

The sad part about it is this - the Technician class license material is not at all difficult to learn.

I passed the Technician, General, and Advanced in one session, with an evening's study. There was more arbitrary material (frequencies and the old names for satellite modes) in Extra so I had to come back for that. And it took 90 days to get to where I could do 13 WPM reliably and pass the 20 WPM test by only writing down material after "is", but nobody has to do that any more.

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.