Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jjjjmoney 955 days ago
The problem with encryption is that it discourages interaction between hams (which is already pretty bad, tbh). Yes, you’re supposed to announce your callsign, but my bet is that unsavory characters would take advantage of that. I think it’s pretty cool to listen in on different protocols and see what people are trying out (M17 is an excellent example).

FHSS is pretty trivial to “decrypt” these days with an SDR.

While you’re not wrong about experimentation, I feel like ham radio should be focused more on the radio side of things rather than encryption implementations. Implementing the hardware and software encoding/decoding is the hard/fun part (at least to me). Encryption should come as a piece of cake after than if you can achieve a given bitrate.

And again - there already are bands that allow encryption. A couple hundred bucks and a few applications, and you’re free to go nuts.

And I completely forgot, but ISM bands do allow encryption, are free, and there is plenty of hardware out there readily available.

3 comments

What open hardware can legally do any useful (open source, auditable, and secure) encrypted voice communication at long distance via ISM?
Talk to your radio supplier, there are many encryption devices routinely used on VHF and UHF.

Of course encryption is not impossible on HF, just a bit more difficult.

Whatever, both commercial and military uses are using encryption on HF.

Commercial and military use encryption with well known backdoors on HF, using bands only they are licensed to use with proprietary hardware.

https://www.wired.com/story/tetra-radio-encryption-backdoor/

This is why proprietary solutions are non-starters.

Civilians deserve real encryption they can control with provable privacy.

Yes, please - I would like to see examples of the hardware stack that enables this use-case.

Thanks.

I’m trying to dig up the M17 messages on the chipsets, but until then - WiFi is incredibly popular and operates on ISM bands. Same with LoraWan, and I have seen some proprietary 900Mhz mesh devices (I think called Milo(?)).

The M17 project found some low cost transceivers that operate on a pretty low level, and I think those would be relevant for future development on ISM for people wanting to use encryption.

Then we restrict portions of the bands to encryption, just like voice, Morse code, etc.
I would argue that the behavior of hams discourages interaction between hams.