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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
We could have a leaderless IRC server, leaderless peer discovery and routing, IP/DNS controlled by consensus.
You can still experiment with and build an encrypted mesh network, but you need different licenses to do so.
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.
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.