[KaiserPro]

> which reduces what you can carry.

the flip side of that is that your operator can be miles away, and using repeaters, hundreds of miles away. As the operator is the difficult to replace part, its a fair tradeoff.

Frequency hopping is nice, as is spread spectrum but its still easily detectable, as is the operator.

[esseph]

You don't use frequency hopping to avoid detection, you use frequency hopping to reduce jamming effectiveness and reduce message pickup/capture (encrypted).