Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#11

Post by jedimastert »

Sanzig wrote: post #6
howard941 wrote: post #2

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…

> 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)

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#12

Post by [deleted] »

arwineap wrote: post #10
rsuelzer wrote: post #9

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…

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?

[deleted]

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#13

Post by Karunamon »

arwineap wrote: post #10
rsuelzer wrote: post #9

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…

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.

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#14

Post by xxpor »

rsuelzer wrote: post #9

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…

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.

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#15

Post by quotemstr »

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.

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#16

Post by throw0101a »

t0mas88 wrote: post #3

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 aviat…

> 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-...

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#17

Post by throw0101a »

The official proposal if anyone is interested:

> 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-...

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#18

Post by dmix »

Karunamon wrote: post #13
arwineap wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat

#19

Post by kylehotchkiss »

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.

Post reply on HN