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Comment by edrxty | Hacker News Reader

It's less stupid than it sounds. The biggest part of it is a ban on encryption for hams and language making true spread spectrum difficult. These are the two biggest components to making radio resistant to interference by the state (eavesdropping and jamming).

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I think it's much easier to explain given the practical necessity of stopping unscrupulous commercial operators from blasting out encrypted binary frequency-hopping messages to customers that clog up the hobbyist's space while not benefiting the community at all.

I'm well aware of this argument but in practice it doesn't work like that. Other countries don't have encryption bans and are fine as you're always required to ID. The nice business band radios you see in the US are often encryption capable and they're allowed to use it on their bands so nothing is stopping them from bleeding into the ham bands (the business radios are wideband enough for this). The reality is the FCC is scared of civilian encryption adoption as evidenced by the lack of any encrypted civilian bands outside of the business/police segments.

The FCC does not care if you use encryption, they just want you to pay for the spectrum. As you observed, radios that can do this are commonly available, you just can't use them on ham bands. IMHO, that's not unreasonable: if you can program a radio, you can figure out how to reserve the spectrum with the FCC too.

Encryption not allowed on ham bands because it makes enforcing non-commercial use impossible. It's as simple as that, no conspiracy theory about "suppressing revolution" is necessary to explain it.

I suspect the FCC regulations around spread spectrum, bitrate, and encryption were more about espionage.

https://hackaday.com/2018/11/26/fcc-gets-complaint-proposed-...

Furthermore, the encryption ban is not specific to ham radio. The guvmin't just wants to be able to listen in, and do so easily.

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