You don’t need one if there’s an emergency, civil unrest would probably qualify as an emergency so non-licensed people can legally transmit.
The FCC hasn’t really punished anyone for not having a license other than those that are really bothersome/disruptive or are doing jamming. But like, if there’s civil unrest, the laws probably don’t matter anymore so you can just ignore the law.
But if you don’t have a license, you don’t have a callsign, and thus others will refuse to talk to you during non-emergency peacetime.
The FCC hasn’t really punished anyone for not having a license other than those that are really bothersome/disruptive or are doing jamming. But like, if there’s civil unrest, the laws probably don’t matter anymore so you can just ignore the law.
If you intend to practice the hobby, get the license. I let mine lapse after 10 years because I don’t practice anymore, but I generally still remember the basic rules and how to operate the gear, so if I ever had an emergency need I’d use what I had access to - but I haven’t transmitted anything in years and years.
This guy’s full of shit. You can talk all you want on the HF bands, they’re certainly not exclusively for contesting. You can do Morse code or digital modes too. The “most actual communication is illegal on ham bands” thing is wrong too, you can talk about pretty much anything you want as long as it’s not “obscene or profane,” according to the FCC.
It’s illegal to transmit music, it’s illegal to transmit anything encrypted unless you’re controlling a satellite, it’s illegal to transmit anything for commercial purposes, and it’s actually illegal to transmit anything on a regular basis that could reasonably be communicated some other way.
it’s illegal to transmit anything encrypted unless you’re controlling a satellite
True, it helps to ensure nothing illegal is going on and enforce keeping commercial interests out. It’s a self regulating space, one of the only cases I know of that tends to work due to there being no monetary interests allowed. The point is to communicate information, not hide it.
it’s illegal to transmit anything for commercial purposes.
True, the whole point is to keep commercial interests out. That’s what “amateur” means.
illegal to transmit anything on a regular basis that could reasonably be communicated some other way.
False. This is for something like a non-profit wanting to use radios for their operations, they should be steered toward another service like gmrs, FRS, murs, etc. instead of amateur radio.
There’s a difference between encryption and encoding, and that difference is intent.
Encoding is the process of imparting a digital message onto the radio carrier. A simple example is Morse code; transmitted by keying a continuous wave on and off in pre-determined patterns of long and short pulses with long and short gaps between. Frequency shift keying and bodot code are the encoding scheme behind RTTY, etc. Hams are permitted to experiment with novel encoding schemes, and have invented a few, PSK31 comes to mind, a phase shift keying standard designed to use commonly available PC sound cards as a modem.
Encryption is the process of obscuring the message for all but the intended recipient. There is one specific case the law calls out when this is permissible in Amateur radio service, and that’s control signals of Amateur radio satellites. A novel encoding scheme, like making up your own alphabet instead of the standard Morse one, or ciphers of any kind that are intended to make the message secret, is illegal.
It’s not uncommon to hear encrypted communiques on the ham bands; I’ve picked them up myself. You want a fun rabbit hole to fall down, look up numbers stations. Some serious cold war james bond bullshit.
I don’t believe it is legal to send a PGP encrypted message over the air (on ham radio, go ahead and send it over Wi-Fi, you can encrypt the shit out of that) even if you’ve posted your private key on your website. What would even be the point of that? tilts head It might be legal to send a PGP signed message over ham radio; if I understand correctly that’s basically a checksum that can guarantee the sender’s possession of a private key.
And intent is functionally impossible to prove, but endlessly arguable and a judge can make a finding based on their judgement - something very different from proof.
send a PGP signed message over ham radio; if I understand correctly that’s basically a checksum that can guarantee the sender’s possession of a private key.
Oh the legal system is pretty good at deciding intent, I mean what’s the difference between manslaughter and murder?
Thing is, it’s not like there’s radio police that are going to pull you over for encrypting. Other hams might turn you in if you’re being annoying. If you send an encrypted email over Hamlink once, or say something like “Beefy Burrito this is Enchilada, the tamales are in the basket” on 33cm once, probably nobody’s gonna notice.
There’s only ~3.7MHz worth of bandwith on the HF bands, another 4MHz on 6m. There’s a lot of attention on the bands that propagate. If you want to secretly communicate with people, use Reddit, or the Fediverse.
You know r/kitty? One of a trillion cat subreddits that had a gimmick that the only written word allowed was “kitty.” All post titles and comments had to consist only of “Kitty.” Arrange with the leaders of the other terrorist cells you’re working for that if u/chudmuffin posts a picture of an orange cat, we attack at dawn, and if he posts a picture of a grey cat, lay low they’re onto us.
Encryption is legal and standard on the internet, where there’s many orders of magnitude more traffic than on the ham bands. I can’t send an encrypted email over Hamlink with a license, but I can host a Tor site without one.
Oh the legal system is pretty good at deciding intent
I wouldn’t say it’s good at determining actual intent, just good at deciding what intent is going to be assigned by the system.
If you send an encrypted email over Hamlink once, or say something like “Beefy Burrito this is Enchilada, the tamales are in the basket” on 33cm once, probably nobody’s gonna notice.
I’ve always wondered how much steganography is in practice - if it’s being practiced well, nobody knows. Setup a HAM station that snaps a photo at sunset and a couple of other random times per day. Transmit the photo in a standard, open digital mode, but hide your message in the noisy lower bits of the 3 color channels 0-255 R G and B, you can easily modify 6 bits per pixel without visually distorting the image, drop that to 1 bit per pixel and nobody who doesn’t know your scheme could ever find it. To the local hams, it’s three chirps a day, with a reliable pretty picture of the sunset and a couple of more varied times. As a utility channel, that’s three opportunities per day to secretly communicate something to a listener that nobody can identify. If the picture is just 2MP, that’s 250kBytes of bandwidth per image.
If you want to secretly communicate with people, use Reddit, or the Fediverse.
Absolutely, though the “listeners” there are more readily identified, even via Tor.
1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works
2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else
For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.
The group AFRL ARRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which ARRL in my experience embodies.
I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier
I agree their bandplan is pretty restricty, but it’s also not law. It’s more for playing nice with each other. Keep high power up here so it doesn’t wipe out the people playing with low power, digital here so they don’t get overrun by voice, etc. You wouldn’t have any idea you’re stepping on someone sending Morse if you’re on FM. So there’s reason for it.
And yeah, with line of sight radios, nobody gives two shits 20 miles from civilization in the woods.
Lol whoops yeah, ARRL. I work in aerospace where we love our alphabet soup and I brainfarted AFRL.
I wasn’t trying to say that the band plan doesn’t exist for a reason, it absolutely does, some reasons which you pointed out exactly. I’ve definitely been around guys who treat the band plan like it is the law, and I imagine the original commenter had the misfortune of running into one of those guys and believed him at face value. Imho it’s one of the reasons ham radio has been dying as a hobby.
Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.
If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.
A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.
I thought about getting a ham license so are you telling me there is really no need?
You don’t need one if there’s an emergency, civil unrest would probably qualify as an emergency so non-licensed people can legally transmit.
The FCC hasn’t really punished anyone for not having a license other than those that are really bothersome/disruptive or are doing jamming. But like, if there’s civil unrest, the laws probably don’t matter anymore so you can just ignore the law.
But if you don’t have a license, you don’t have a callsign, and thus others will refuse to talk to you during non-emergency peacetime.
Thanks for reminding me of this movie. :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_Up_the_Volume_(film)
If you intend to practice the hobby, get the license. I let mine lapse after 10 years because I don’t practice anymore, but I generally still remember the basic rules and how to operate the gear, so if I ever had an emergency need I’d use what I had access to - but I haven’t transmitted anything in years and years.
This guy’s full of shit. You can talk all you want on the HF bands, they’re certainly not exclusively for contesting. You can do Morse code or digital modes too. The “most actual communication is illegal on ham bands” thing is wrong too, you can talk about pretty much anything you want as long as it’s not “obscene or profane,” according to the FCC.
It’s illegal to transmit music, it’s illegal to transmit anything encrypted unless you’re controlling a satellite, it’s illegal to transmit anything for commercial purposes, and it’s actually illegal to transmit anything on a regular basis that could reasonably be communicated some other way.
True, for obvious reasons
True, it helps to ensure nothing illegal is going on and enforce keeping commercial interests out. It’s a self regulating space, one of the only cases I know of that tends to work due to there being no monetary interests allowed. The point is to communicate information, not hide it.
True, the whole point is to keep commercial interests out. That’s what “amateur” means.
False. This is for something like a non-profit wanting to use radios for their operations, they should be steered toward another service like gmrs, FRS, murs, etc. instead of amateur radio.
I call bs on the encryption part too. You just need to publicly post the key for your encryption and say you’re not trying to hide what you’re saying.
I haven’t seen any regulations saying where you need to publicly post the key.
I say license up now and learn it how the shit works. Never know when some “pirate” stations may be needed.
There’s a difference between encryption and encoding, and that difference is intent.
Encoding is the process of imparting a digital message onto the radio carrier. A simple example is Morse code; transmitted by keying a continuous wave on and off in pre-determined patterns of long and short pulses with long and short gaps between. Frequency shift keying and bodot code are the encoding scheme behind RTTY, etc. Hams are permitted to experiment with novel encoding schemes, and have invented a few, PSK31 comes to mind, a phase shift keying standard designed to use commonly available PC sound cards as a modem.
Encryption is the process of obscuring the message for all but the intended recipient. There is one specific case the law calls out when this is permissible in Amateur radio service, and that’s control signals of Amateur radio satellites. A novel encoding scheme, like making up your own alphabet instead of the standard Morse one, or ciphers of any kind that are intended to make the message secret, is illegal.
It’s not uncommon to hear encrypted communiques on the ham bands; I’ve picked them up myself. You want a fun rabbit hole to fall down, look up numbers stations. Some serious cold war james bond bullshit.
I don’t believe it is legal to send a PGP encrypted message over the air (on ham radio, go ahead and send it over Wi-Fi, you can encrypt the shit out of that) even if you’ve posted your private key on your website. What would even be the point of that? tilts head It might be legal to send a PGP signed message over ham radio; if I understand correctly that’s basically a checksum that can guarantee the sender’s possession of a private key.
And intent is functionally impossible to prove, but endlessly arguable and a judge can make a finding based on their judgement - something very different from proof.
Correct.
Oh the legal system is pretty good at deciding intent, I mean what’s the difference between manslaughter and murder?
Thing is, it’s not like there’s radio police that are going to pull you over for encrypting. Other hams might turn you in if you’re being annoying. If you send an encrypted email over Hamlink once, or say something like “Beefy Burrito this is Enchilada, the tamales are in the basket” on 33cm once, probably nobody’s gonna notice.
There’s only ~3.7MHz worth of bandwith on the HF bands, another 4MHz on 6m. There’s a lot of attention on the bands that propagate. If you want to secretly communicate with people, use Reddit, or the Fediverse.
You know r/kitty? One of a trillion cat subreddits that had a gimmick that the only written word allowed was “kitty.” All post titles and comments had to consist only of “Kitty.” Arrange with the leaders of the other terrorist cells you’re working for that if u/chudmuffin posts a picture of an orange cat, we attack at dawn, and if he posts a picture of a grey cat, lay low they’re onto us.
Encryption is legal and standard on the internet, where there’s many orders of magnitude more traffic than on the ham bands. I can’t send an encrypted email over Hamlink with a license, but I can host a Tor site without one.
I wouldn’t say it’s good at determining actual intent, just good at deciding what intent is going to be assigned by the system.
I’ve always wondered how much steganography is in practice - if it’s being practiced well, nobody knows. Setup a HAM station that snaps a photo at sunset and a couple of other random times per day. Transmit the photo in a standard, open digital mode, but hide your message in the noisy lower bits of the 3 color channels 0-255 R G and B, you can easily modify 6 bits per pixel without visually distorting the image, drop that to 1 bit per pixel and nobody who doesn’t know your scheme could ever find it. To the local hams, it’s three chirps a day, with a reliable pretty picture of the sunset and a couple of more varied times. As a utility channel, that’s three opportunities per day to secretly communicate something to a listener that nobody can identify. If the picture is just 2MP, that’s 250kBytes of bandwidth per image.
Absolutely, though the “listeners” there are more readily identified, even via Tor.
Over here in Germany encryption is most definitely illegal. This includes encoded messages only the intended recipient could decode.
Get into ham radio if you like radios, that’s pretty much the only topic you’ll find on the air.
A HAM license realistically is for two things:
1 the test teaches you major items you should know about how radio works 2 how to not fuck shit up for everyone else
For the bands allocated to HAM radio in the US, as long as you’re not fucking shit up for everyone else the FCC doesn’t really care. A good example of that and my personal favorite rule is the power transmission rule of “only enough power to complete the transmission”. Functionally it’s so vague that I doubt anyone would ever actually get their license suspended over it.
The group
AFRLARRL has a pretty restrictive “band plan” that I think is where the above comment’s salt is coming from. A perception I have and have heard others talk about is the HAM community has a tendency to be borderline hostile to newcomers and are very gate-keepy, which ARRL in my experience embodies.I have a license purely to play by the rules from a legal standpoint when I’m out in the rocky mountains hiking and camping with friends, makes communicating with different groups way easier
Edit: formatting, typoing ARRL
Do you mean ARRL?
I agree their bandplan is pretty restricty, but it’s also not law. It’s more for playing nice with each other. Keep high power up here so it doesn’t wipe out the people playing with low power, digital here so they don’t get overrun by voice, etc. You wouldn’t have any idea you’re stepping on someone sending Morse if you’re on FM. So there’s reason for it.
And yeah, with line of sight radios, nobody gives two shits 20 miles from civilization in the woods.
Lol whoops yeah, ARRL. I work in aerospace where we love our alphabet soup and I brainfarted AFRL.
I wasn’t trying to say that the band plan doesn’t exist for a reason, it absolutely does, some reasons which you pointed out exactly. I’ve definitely been around guys who treat the band plan like it is the law, and I imagine the original commenter had the misfortune of running into one of those guys and believed him at face value. Imho it’s one of the reasons ham radio has been dying as a hobby.
So am I able to goof around on the radio till I get my license or do I really need to have my license first?
Nothing legally stops you from listening. To transmit, you are legally required to have a callsign (which you must broadcast during transmit) and your callsign must be licensed for that frequency.
If you break the law, it’s highly unlikely that the FCC themselves will hunt you down and fine you. If you’re using it to talk to others on the HAM bands, they’ll likely get pissed at you for not being licensed but actually tracking you down is difficult. Using it for your own personal projects, friend groups, etc, it’s unlikely anyone would notice you at all.
A license is like $15 for life (just need to occasionally tell the FCC you’re still alive), the test will teach you some stuff, I don’t see it as that onerous to play by the rules so I’d recommend following them.
It’s illegal to push that button until you’re licensed.
(No one will search you out if you’re not being annoying)