The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat | Hacker News Reader

The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

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220 pointsErrorcod365 comments

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321272

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20178799

The proposed frequency is just above the aviation VHF band (108 to 136Mhz) so it makes sense to use it when aviation runs out of frequencies to use.

However... EASA has made all aviation radios switch from 25Khz channel spacing to 8.33Khz channel spacing, essentially tripling the available number of frequencies for everything between 118 and 136Mhz. So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe).

The US has some shortage (and still uses 25Khz channel separation), but they solved it by sharing frequencies between small airports.

> So I cannot imagine there is a current lack of frequencies for aviation in France (or anywhere in Europe).

This isn't about voice / ATC, but rather about up/downlinks for drones and such. From the background on the proposal:

> The decisions of previous conferences have introduced some restrictions to the use and have imposed constraints on the development of aeronautical mobile applications within some existing mobile allocations traditionally used by the aeronautical mobile applications.

> At the same time, the number of manned and unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors has grown significantly in the past 20 years together with the need of bidirectional low to high data rate communications. Aeronautical applications like fire surveillance, border surveillance, air quality and environment monitoring, traffic monitoring, disaster monitoring, terrain modelling, imagery (visible, infrared, radar, meteo), video monitoring require non-safety communications between various types of aeronautical platforms.

> Consequently the need of non-safety data communications between various types of aeronautical platforms increases and so the need for new frequency bands.

* https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-...

Why would you want to try to pump video over VHF? You have line of sight to everyone when you are in an airplane. Use a higher frequency band that allows for much more bandwidth and therefore higher data speeds. The little 1.2GHz video transmitters can easily reach 10km. That is cruising altitude for a commercial airliner. Having the proper license would get you even greater distance with a higher transmit power. Have the drone/UAV transmit ADS-B data and use GPS position to point a high-gain directional antenna at it, that should get you even more bandwidth.

This, to me, is why this request is so unusual. This is much more suited for spread spectrum, secure, short wavelength (smaller antennas) and the like, and its surprising that Thales - a world renowned avionics corporation - is behind the push. It's also why I think this big 2m band scare is moot; someone didn't actually do the engineering, it's like they just threw out a random number and put it in a powerpoint slide.

I can't help but feel the amateur radio community could have used a rebrand for the internet age. I understand there's a lot of history but it's hard to get young people interested in being _hams_, a word that has not aged well. I got my licence about a decade back and really loved the technical pieces - learning about how radio waves worked, propagation with different bands, the ability to (try) to build your own modem with two radios and an Arduino, but when it came to actually talking to people on the radio... other people just wanted to talk about radios.

It is really fascinating what you can do with 2m band radios. For those times and places where your cell phone won't work, digital modes on the new Icom radios look pretty cool. Being able to hook up a radio to a laptop to send something digitally still seems valuable and relevant! But the community branding could use some modernization to push those use cases.

> other people just wanted to talk about radios.

I felt the same disappointment when I got into amateur radio just before the modern internet took off. I loved the idea of talking with people around the world and maybe even practicing some foreign languages, so I immediately set up a station for DXing. All those people from exotic foreign countries just wanted to make a few quick remarks about their radios. No one wanted to exchange any actual culture.

But to be fair, the wording of amateur radio regulations in many countries suggests that hams should not try to have substantial conversations over the airwaves. Also, since amateur radio is hobby dominated by older people, a lot of hams in Eastern Europe still remember the Communist era when contact with foreigners was supposed to be strictly business.

Well at least with SSB and CW you have a short conversation. JT8, etc, have reduced “contacts” to a few bytes.

Don’t get me wrong, pushing the Shannon capacity limit is great, but I’ll wager many stations are not even running QRP for the newer digital modes.

>JT8, etc, have reduced "contacts" to a few bytes

I think you mixed up FT8 and JS8 there. :)

FT8 is the (effectively) zero-interaction DX mode. JS8 exactly the opposite-- a weak signal mode based on FT8 tailored for ragchewing.

Ha ha, I guess the modes in WSJT-X. I know JT65 is one. At least with PSK31 you are typing in real-time. With JT65 it’s fully automated. Ought to only be counted as a contact when it’s below the 2.5 kHz noise bandwidth. When I can hear multiple JT65 signals in SSB audio, that’s totally cheating. Those guys are probably running +10W.

> But to be fair, the wording of amateur radio regulations in many countries suggests that hams should not try to have substantial conversations over the airwaves.

But it's worth noting: A lot of that verbiage dates from the Cold War, and is rooted in the spy communications culture that leftover from WW2. It's pretty doubtful that any intelligence service gives a damn about what goes over the air these days. In fact, it would be a bonus for your adversary's old-fashioned "listening posts", because they could "intercept" the broadcast.

So an ITU update to what is allowed to go out over the air would also be sensible.

Edit: Although you just know encrypted packets would be forbidden, despite the fact that we can easily send encrypted packets via the internet, which requires a great deal more work to "intercept".

What has worked well for me is to ask questions about non-controversial topics that most people are interested in. A great one is food. I've often told people in other countries (or even here in the US) that I would like to visit their area sometime, and what are some local foods I should try?

This has started some pretty interesting conversations, because who doesn't like food and talking about it? And it shows that I'm interested in their local culture.

I agree. I have my license, but I never really use it. However, I greatly value the things I learned in the process of getting my license. Understanding how RF works is really helpful for making WiFi work better, for example.

In my opinion one of the best ways of injecting some new life into the community would be to let people take their test online.

Agreed, going to take a proctored test is such a huge barrier to entry.

I think I'm going to disagree with that. Because I had to take the test in person I meet the guys in the local club. Their personal invite to club meeting and lent gear got me on the air quickly. If I just took the test online I would probably have just put my license up on the wall and moved onto something else.

73's KC3SOL

He gave you the answer and you ignored it.

Instead you reverted to the classic: "Let's make taking the test easier for people".

I got my license 2 decades ago and never really use it. How about those modern use cases?

Two better ways: remove the need for a test or license at all, at least at many more frequencies and below energy levels well above current limits (which say you can transmit around 2.4 Ghz for example up to some power license-free). Second is to remove any restrictions on what is transmitted, which lets you have purely digital frequency modulated end-to-end encrypted signals meant for amateur computers to decipher.

But making the test online sounds a lot more feasible a change. I'm just skeptical of its effects. e.g. It wouldn't have made me any likelier to pursue amateur radar fun further.

As much as I'd love to have more people in amateur radio, and the ability to use encryption, I think both the licensing and prohibition on encryption are fairly critical to keeping things running smoothly.

The test includes lots of useful information such as requirements to transmit your callsign and using minimum power necessary.

The prohibition on encryption is pretty critical to enforce other rules such as only using it for non-commercial purposes. Encryption isn't actually necessary for any of the stated purposes of amateur radio (experimentation, recreation, training, contesting, emergency comms, etc). You can still use any digital mode, including digital signatures, but not encryption of the content.

I might be in favor of creating a class lower than Technician, and allowing taking the test online, though. You should still be assigned a callsign that you are required to transmit.

My comments are limited to the US because these things are managed differently in different countries.

Given how much the spectrum landscape is changing (i.e. 5G), I think we should rework how strictly we allocate spectrum, especially lower-power/ lower frequency stuff. I should be able to create a broadcast radio station with X mile radius pretty easily. Is X=30mi? I cannot say, but the intense regulations are onerous, and I think the recent decline in local journalism might be reversed by an increase in local broadcast radio.

> Encryption isn't actually necessary for any of the stated purposes of amateur radio (experimentation, recreation, training, contesting, emergency comms, etc)

It is, or will be, needed for experimentation. Wireless security cannot be an afterthought anymore; communication modes and protocols need to be built with security in mind from day 1.

There is one area where encryption is expressly permitted in amateur radio: satellite control, for obvious reasons. The future of amateur radio is not people talking to people over narrowband voice channels; it's going to be machines talking to other machines, and being able to control them. This is going to require encryption, or innovation will shift off the ham bands. And if the ARS is just ragchews, contesting, and doing things that have already been done instead of advancing communication, then there's not much defense when someone like Thales comes in and suggests reallocating bandwidth to something new and enterprising.

A few points:

Encryption isn't typically part of the physical or data link layers, which are the bread and butter of amateur radio. What you send on top of those isn't really the interesting part of amateur radio, from a technical perspective.

The actual rule prohibits "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning" which I think most people interpret to mean digital signatures for authentication and integrity are permitted, just not encrypted payloads.

Many protocols have the ability to switch ciphers, including disabling encryption entirely while still performing authentication and integrity checking.

A use case I want out of amateur radio regulation is private anonymous communication traceable only via motivated actors using triangulation etc to a physical broadcast point, which may be moving and not always on.

I want this not for commercial or nefarious reasons (though it would be used for such and I don't care) but because I want some attempt at private-by-default in everything, even just experimenting or recreational. The edge cases where I'd want maximum openness, like in emergencies, are rare, so shouldn't be the default. It's not going to happen I know, but it's what it'd take to bring me into it and I presume more competent philosophical aligned people (there's a few in the overall threads) who could use the lessened restrictions for actual societal innovation (positive or negative).

I think the rebranding is happening slowly.

There are really two amateur radio "communities" (though with a fair amount of overlap): the older "ragchewing" generations that didn't grow up with the Internet, and the newer generations that care more about experimenting with shiny new technology.

As the former generation "retires" and new licensees join it will continue to shift.

There have been a record number of new licenses granted in recent years (though that doesn't necessarily translate to actual engagement in the hobby) http://www.arrl.org/news/another-outstanding-year-for-amateu...

> I can't help but feel the amateur radio community could have used a rebrand for the internet age. I understand there's a lot of history but it's hard to get young people interested in being _hams_, a word that has not aged well. I got my licence about a decade back and really loved the technical pieces - learning about how radio waves worked, propagation with different bands, the ability to (try) to build your own modem with two radios and an Arduino, but when it came to actually talking to people on the radio... other people just wanted to talk about radios.

> It is really fascinating what you can do with 2m band radios. For those times and places where your cell phone won't work, digital modes on the new Icom radios look pretty cool. Being able to hook up a radio to a laptop to send something digitally still seems valuable and relevant! But the community branding could use some modernization to push those use cases.

Packet radio is awesome. Long distance, communication unmediated by third parties is awesome. Building gateways for sms/email is possible. I pointed an antenna at a satellite in the sky and received data. If I got to touch this stuff as a kid it would have blown my world apart.

There is so much possibility, if people think ham radio is just old white dudes talking about radios they are not digging deeply enough.

The potential is obvious once you really start to grasp the reality of the electric field and its properties. (A favorite Feynman vid to give laymen a taste: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4) I don't see how any worthwhile possibilities can be realized at the amateur level however given just two of the restrictions I pointed out in a sibling thread...

as an aside, I got my ham radio licence because of my interest in long distance microwave mesh networking. there is a group called aredn http://www.arednmesh.org which uses wifi devices modified to run in the Amateur portions of 2ghz and 5ghz to create massive mesh networks. The lack of noise on our allocations means we can make really long connections. I personally have a 50 dollar Microtik dish that makes a 25 mile connection to a backbone node and get about 25mbps. If there are any HAMs that are reading this, or you want to become a HAM it's a fun project that blends computers and radio.

I seem to remember some issues around running anything encrypted on frequencies meant for the public, but I've always been interesting in citizen mesh networking.

Is it legal, or just not enforced?

At least in the US, encryption of any kind on amateur bands is prohibited.

Hams tend to be really good at self-policing, so if a curious person horns in on your traffic and discovers that it's encrypted, you can expect a knock on your door, if you're lucky from the guy that looked up your license from the public database (you're required to transmit your callsign at regular intervals) to ask you to fix it, if you're unlucky, from an FCC enforcement guy in a suit.

So if you can't run any modern internet what would you use the mesh network for? Some of Google's traffic charts show up to 90% of traffic is TLS in the US for Chrome users.

It's an intranet. Sort of a backup internet that would allow for data to be sent at a much higher rate than just voice.

Here is the map in So Cal of the active nodes. https://mapping.kg6wxc.net/meshmap/map_display.php#8/33.970/...

Also, in emergency situations regular FCC rules are suspended so encryption is not a problem. We actually used this mesh to provide internet to hams working emergency communications in a fire zone after their internet lines were burned out.

That's way bigger than I thought it would be. Neat.

Also good point about emergencies and backups.

You would use it to talk to other amateur radio operators about amateur radio operating and amateur radio equipment, obviously.

The prohibition on encrypted content is a deal-breaker for me, and a lot of other people, who might otherwise want to experiment with connecting to the Internet from difficult locations.

But since the Internet runs on encrypted protocols now, using unencrypted amateur radio transmissions potentially means eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks, so you can't do anything sensitive or personal, or even anything requiring login credentials.

And since hams are very likely to narc, snitch, or grass on you to defend the sanctity and integrity of their hobby, you can't do anything interesting or unusual for long before someone finds a rule that forbids whatever it is you were doing and forces you to stop.

> And since hams are very likely to narc, snitch, or grass

You forgot rats and stool pigeons. It really detracted from the extremely important point you were making.

Nevertheless, it is one of the unpleasant traits that turned me off from a hobby that I'd otherwise be interested in. The technical aspects are appealing, but it's the outdated rules regime and the people in the community that drove me off.

It may be different in your locale, but the hams around me are mainly older white men, and the voices that can be heard on the air are frequently strongly biased against my moral and political opinions. And they have no "block" buttons.

Correct, although there are a group of us looking to change this rule and the FCC seems receptive. It is the AARL that is a bit slow on this issue.

The original rules were drafted during the cold war, so times have changed. More importantly, we believe it is possible to not hide the intent and recepient of a message, while still protecting sensitive content using open source encryption methods.

There are cases that encryption is necessary to maintaining the integrity of emergency infrastructure. For example, remotely logging into a Mesh Node to change the operating frequencies, or sending HIPPA information.

If someone wanted to monitor RF packets they could see that I am logging into my administration console, but they don't really need to see the password.

But, until the FCC issues clear guidance on encryption on the microwave frequencies we do our best to disable it, although there are some emergency services that are literally only available over https, so some hams have decided to forge ahead in the hopes of forcing a rule change.

>If someone wanted to monitor RF packets they could see that I am logging into my administration console, but they don't really need to see the password.

Interesting note.. some regular analog repeaters do something similar to this. If someone needs to make a settings change, they're managed via DTMF (dialpad) sounds. Normally the repeater would relay everything, but it can detect the DTMFs and just replace them with beeps or silence before rebroadcasting.

I don’t see how encryption is required there. Strong cryptographic authentication, yes—but that could be as easy as an HMAC with a key shared offline.

The HIPAA information is a great example of what should be kept off the amateur bands, except in an emergency when forgoing encryption is appropriate.

There's something similar in the Seattle/Victoria area.

https://hamwan.org/

It's really fun to play with. It's not strictly a mesh, but that's OK. It's used heavily for EMCOMM as well as internet linking repeater sites on the tops of mountains where there's no other internet.

Another great project, although I don't think they have modified their firmware to run outside of the Part 15 wifi bands, so they have to deal with noise... Could be wrong though. :)

If anyone is interested in setting up one of these in San Francisco I've got a line of sight to much of downtown and maybe East Bay.

The fact that there was little opposition was partly due to the short time between the submittal of the amended proposal by France and the meeting itself.

Here's some background by someone who is well connected with the German authorities:

http://mailman.pe1itr.com/pipermail/moon-net/2019-June/03977...

There's a lot more to this than simply taking spectrum away from hams. This potentially affects other ham bands too.

The allotted spectrum for ham use was designed intelligently to reduce (though not completely eliminate) the chances of hams accidentally clobbering folks outside of a ham band with harmonics. So for someone operating in the 10 meter band (28-29.7MHz), the 2nd harmonic is the 6 meter band (50-54MHz), the 8th harmonic is the 1.25m band (220-224MHz) and the 16th harmonic is the 2 meter band being discussed. The closest band to cause interference on the 2m band would be users of the the 1.25m band though as the 2m band is the 2nd harmonic from it.

Also, this is why the 2m and 70cm bands (144/440MHz) are commonly included on the same radio: one antenna can sort-of work for both bands. The antenna is tuned for the 2m band and that means it will also radiate 3rd harmonic excitations as well (the 440MHz band is the 3rd harmonic from the 144MHz band). So it works decent for 2 meters and as a crappy but acceptable 70cm band antenna. The only casualty is the 2nd harmonic band between them at 288MHz which is not allocated to hams.

But anyway, there's no "type acceptance" required for ham radios because that allows hams to build their own gear and not just be appliance operators. Thales is setting themselves up for a lifetime of potential problems if they manage to crack open the 2m band for commercial use.

Lastly, I will say that this is from the US perspective, I'm less well versed in ITU regions and bands available outside of the US. Thanks.

There are too many existing terrestrial and space users for this to fly. They're not getting a globally harmonized ham band. Is it April 1?

Especially not one of the most popular bands for new hams (and probably one of the most popular bands period). The vast majority of young hams these days enter the hobby by getting whichever basic license their country offers and buying a cheap Chinese dual-band 2m/70cm handheld radio (like the ubiquitous Baofeng). Learning how the repeaters work is a rite of passage.

While I think 70cm is probably more popular than 2m in Europe, 2m is the preferred default in North America. Just about everywhere you go on the continent, you'll be able to find a 2m band FM repeater on some nearby hilltop with the customary 600 kHz channel spacing and a CTCSS control tone. Is every cash-strapped amateur radio club supposed to go and drop a few grand to convert all these stations to 70cm?

I could probably see an argument for potentially clawing back (not eliminating) the bandwidth for some of the microwave allocations in C band and up, which are definitely under-utilized by the amateur radio community. But Thales trying to make a land-grab on one of the most popular ham bands simply because it happens to be globally allocated is utterly absurd.

> The vast majority of young hams these days enter the hobby by getting whichever basic license their country offers and buying a cheap Chinese dual-band 2m/70cm handheld radio (like the ubiquitous Baofeng).

Calling in as one of those people. Part of the reason I did so is that, for a small time commitment and about $30 I can do a small part of community service in the form of traffic nets and external communication (I do regularly check into the local traffic net, although I've yet to generate or accept any traffic. I should do that at one point)

According to the article, it's only 144-146. Here in the US, we actually have 144-148 (4Mhz wide). I wouldn't be surprised if not only the ARRL got involved but other government agencies as well, here, if this actually looked like it was going to occur.

Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the 2M band is the workhorse for things like storm spotters talking to the NWS. All storm spotting happens on a 2M repeater here as well as across networks all across the midwest. There is no simple replacement for it. There are millions of dollars in investment by thousands of smaller organizations that would be a massive burden to replace.

From the ARRL: http://www.arrl.org/news/restraint-urged-in-response-to-2-me...

The official proposal if anyone is interested:

> Consequently the need of non-safety data communications between various types of aeronautical platforms increases and so the need for new frequency bands.

* https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-...

The thing is, 2 MHz of bandwidth in VHF isn't going to help the vast majority of those use cases. The best you can hope for is low-rate telemetry in that band (since that 2 MHz is going to need to be shared with other UAV users, and the noise temperature at VHF is horrendous due to man-made interference).

Those use cases more properly belong in the microwave bands. Why aren't they going after allocation in L-band and S-band?

I also fail to understand why they need an globally coordinated allocation for this. Surely with GPS + cognitive radio approaches, a UAV could use a local allocation set aside for this purpose wherever it's operating?

I have this radio

https://www.amazon.com/Yaesu-FT-60R-Handheld-Amateur-Transce...

which works on both the 2-meter and 70-cm band, particularly if you use this kind of antenna:

http://hamuniverse.com/2mladjpole.html

I live in a poor spot for 2m, we have some active club repeaters. Someone is always listening on those repeaters, but they probably don't want to chat with you.

The west coast has more VHF and UHF action than any place I have been on the east. There are repeaters with people who talk nonstop in English, Spanish, other languages. You hear people talking on 2m at 4:00 in the morning around Van Nuyes.

There are millions of these radios in the hands of both licensed hams AND unlicensed preppers/airsoft players/etc who bought their $25 BaoFeng radio on Amazon.

Thales wants to reallocate the band for autonomous drone operations.

What could possibly go wrong?

Unpopular opinion time: spectrum is a limited resource. We shouldn't waste it on efficient analog technologies like conventional commercial and amateur radio. We've already ceased conventional broadcasts: that's a step in the right direction, but there's more to do. The entire RF spectrum should be devoted to LTE-like efficient, packetized, and secure communication. I'd make small exceptions for things like radio astronomy, but I don't think we should be squandering prime regions of the EM frequency space just to support transceivers that Marconi would have recognized.

The solar flare that eliminates all the modern methods appreciates your opinion

People have been bringing up the solar flare electromagnetic boogeyman for decades. It's never been an actual problem

Maybe not your lifetime but it has happened and we have been damned lucky more than once recently

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...

I was around for that. Civilization did not end. Services were not disrupted.

I'm saddened that your unpopular opinion targets the very people who pioneered efficient, packetized secure communications, but reminded that there's a reason why we hams lost 220-222 to UPS - we failed to exploit it when we had it.

There's nothing between 54Mhz and 222 Mhz for hams other than the 2m allocation. Please pick on someone else.

One of the most important problems with discussion today is people seeing personal attacks where none exist. I'm stating a policy position, not "target[ing]" people. Conflating policy and personal attacks makes it impossible to discuss policy in a reasonable way.

I don't buy that at all. There are far more important problems than those that arise from voicing an opinion and having to field defenses from those who'd suffer under the unpopular policy regime you espouse.

Well, for one thing, conventional analog broadcasts have not ceased. For example, every FM radio station in North America still broadcasts using the old fashioned FM carrier approach with stereo multiplexed on an AM subcarrier. So-called "digital" stations in North America use OFDM sub-carriers stuffed into the band edges (HD Radio), but they are still backwards-compatible with analog radios due to the widespread deployment of the existing technology.

Also, amateur radio does not necessarily mean old-fashioned and analog. There is a lot of work by amateurs into Shannon-approaching communications on the HF bands, for example. The ham bands exist primarily for education and experimentation.

Backwards compatibility is important. Education is important. Filling the bands with spread-spectrum Shannon-approaching noise may be optimal as far as maximizing data throughput is concerned, but it does not serve some of the other practical constraints on spectrum use.

No it shouldn’t. It’s amateur radio, and an amateur should not have to develop an OFDM modem with LDPC coding, just to experiment. They should be able to cobble together a single tube radio and have fun, while learning something. You don’t want to turn 99.99% of amateur licensees into appliance operators.

I was talking with a friend the other day, a brilliant young software developer at Google, and the topic of ham radio came up. He said what really got him excited about it was the possibility of building his own transmitter from scratch, using individual components he could see and fully understand.

I think that is something to encourage even in this day of LTE.

Have you ever actually used an SDR? Like an RTL-SDR or similar? Go buy one for $20, plug in it and tell me how much spectrum you actually see being used across the board. Below the frequencies used for high speed communications (>800MHz, LTE, WiFi2/5 etc) you'll find a whole lot of dark blue waterfall, even with an appropriate antenna.

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