[trangus_1985]

Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together.

And if that's the use case you want, you should look elsewhere.... At least, that's what the people leading the ham radio community and arrl say.

I'm not sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure I disagree either. I certainly think the community aspect is less important today due to the internet, but it's probably still crucial.

[generalizations]

> you should look elsewhere.... At least, that's what the people leading the ham radio community and arrl say.

And that's what people are doing, which is (I'd guess) why we're commenting on an article about the uncertain future of HAM radio.

Also, that's going to change the community, but it won't erase it. Just like the HN community isn't hampered by the presence of encryption.

[trangus_1985]

Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.

When I flung packets across the bay with a friend, we used cell phones to figure out antenna positioning and alignment. violating the spirit of the intention of these rules, imo, but hard to say

[generalizations]

> Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.

Makes sense. And my cohort comes from an era when we can talk to anyone, anywhere, but the channels are controlled and watched. The ability to communicate isn't special anymore, but the ability to communicate independently and privately is. We don't want communication, we want known-good (dare I say, safe?) communication channels.

[trangus_1985]

> the channels are controlled and watched

Do you think that ham radio couldn't be? Or isn't? What you really want is privacy, authz/authn concerns, and decentralization, it sounds like. And TCP/IP is about as useful as a "PHY" layer for your application as is ham radio.

Plus, solutions like what you're describing require a relative ease of use - unless you only want to talk to the 17 other people in your geographical area who have similar technical backgrounds.

[generalizations]

The whole idea of long range is that my geographical area isn't a limiting factor. I'd be on a 20kbps VPN LAN with the 200 other people in the world who have similar technical backgrounds - especially if we were running this over shortwave.

And that's just the beginning, before people put in the effort to make it more accessible.

TCP/IP isn't the point, it's the encryption that lets me send encrypted, secure emails to my friends over a network that only wideband jamming or a natural disaster can take down.

[gravypod]

Not to mention the amazing software we could build in a distributed P2P way now that we have a massive amount if research into things like CRDTs and consensus algorithms.

We could have a leaderless IRC server, leaderless peer discovery and routing, IP/DNS controlled by consensus.

[ethbr0]

The difference is that the internet, at the physical level, is centralized through interconnects. In a way that radio transmission need not be.

[skwirl]

Also what the federal government says.

You can still experiment with and build an encrypted mesh network, but you need different licenses to do so.

[Causality1]

Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together

My question is whether this kind of regulated openness is more worthy of the spectrum assigned to hams than some alternative scheme might be. It's certainly not a very efficient use of spectrum.

[na85]

>Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together.

Maybe on paper. Where I live it seems to be about old grouchy white guys gatekeeping and LARPing that they would be of any value in a natural disaster.