I wonder how this compares to their previous statements and policies, because with a million people out of power and most communication systems offline, it does seem that charging people is just wrong, and the lack of the necessity of emergency communication provided by Amateurs was stated as a reason for them not exempting them from licensing fees.
>The FCC also disagreed with those who argued that amateur radio licensees should be exempt from fees because of their public service contribution during emergencies and disasters.
>“[W]e we are very much aware of these laudable and important services amateur radio licensees provide to the American public,” the FCC said, but noted that specific exemptions provided under Section 8 of the so-called “Ray Baum’s Act” requiring the FCC to assess the fees do not apply to amateur radio personal licenses. “Emergency communications, for example, are voluntary and are not required by our rules,” the FCC noted. “As we have noted previously, ‘[w]hile the value of the amateur service to the public as a voluntary noncommercial communications service, particularly with respect to providing emergency communications, is one of the underlying principles of the amateur service, the amateur service is not an emergency radio service.’” [0]
The point of the license is to make sure people are treating the spectrum well, not generate revenue. I will point out similar fees are assessed to get a license to operate a car which is probably more important in an emergency.
They should figure out how to rework the regulations to limit bandwidth, not baud. The intent is to keep a few amateur radio operators from hogging a ton of the very limited HF spectrum. If somebody can figure out how to cram more data into a small slice of bandwidth, more power to them.
"In 2016, in response to an ARRL petition for rulemaking, the FCC proposed to remove the symbol rate limitations, which it tentatively concluded had become unnecessary due to advances in modulation techniques and no longer served a useful purpose. That proceeding, WT Docket 16-239, is still pending."
I've had a number of "cordial debates" with crusty old hams on this subject. The old guard is still very much hung up on the Old Way. Change scares a lot of the people who learned on expensive vaccum tube systems before the hobby was more broadly accessible. Things like high baudrate, bandwidth negotiation, spread spectrum and encryption scare the pants off of them regardless of the fact that the bands are mostly empty.
"bandwidth negotiation" - HF paths are often unidirectional in the sense that you can interfere with station A without station B being able to hear. You can easily interfere with people you can't hear and autonegotiation mean you're autojamming without being aware of it. Not an issue with "human in the loop" modes. No application layer need for it anyway.
"spread spectrum" - See above, plus raising the noise floor means the death of entire weak signal modes.
"encryption" - Absolutely no need. Would be death of ham radio. Why bother with cheap ham radio licenses if you can just transmit anything you want but encrypted.
"the bands are mostly empty" Buy a better antenna LOL.
I am not unamenable with the crusty old hams in some regards. Part of the charm of these little slices of the spectrum are that they are are, in some part, the only place where you can meaningfully interact with legacy analog radio technology and specifications. There are lots of places you can muck about with digital radio, shiny new specs, mesh networks, etc etc. But if you want to build your own antenna, grab a super low powered transmitter and bounce an analog signal off the atmo to talk with a person halfway around the globe, Ham radio is where to be. It's reasonable for people to desire to protect that.
Those "crusty old hams" include people who designed VLSI. Designed modern computer languages. Wrote the RFCs in IETF on how to do things.
I think you seriously mis-understand how much the "crusty old hams" know, and do, in the modern Internet: They helped build it. Not only the SL/IP and AX25 part, a lot more than just that.
Read up on KA9Q. Top hit in wikipedia is good. Now, look at the person. The wikipedia link is good. Now, go look at the company he works at, or used to. Now, open your cellphone, and look at the logo on the chipsets...
Old guard. VLM is in the right. As a kid i was a terror. Killowatts of power. Irressistable! But we decided, ricky and i, to stick to fm. I do not believe we were loved.
Radio engineering doesn't mesh well with a "move fast and break things" world view. Often the things you're breaking mean other people are losing out.
The world of HF is very different from higher bands because of propagation and low band width (especially for hams). With a well tuned antenna even a relatively modest transmitter can DX hundreds or thousands of miles.
* The low band width on HF with a high noise floor makes high symbol rates pointless throughout the band. You'd need so much FEC there'd be little benefit from the higher rates. A symbol rate that might work fine for contacts a hundred miles apart will just be noise for contacts five hundred miles away. Because of DXing on HF it's entirely possible to have your transmissions picked up across the hemisphere.
* Likewise symbol rate negotiation is problematic because of propagation. Transmissions aren't point to point links even if you're addressing a particular station. Like the point above symbol rates that work for two stations will not necessarily work for all stations that will receive the signal. That's just more noise for them and an inability to use that part of the band.
* The band width for hams on HF is too small for spread spectrum comms to be useful. Yet again transmissions that work in some conditions won't necessarily work everywhere the transmission reaches.
* Quick, what's the difference between an encrypted signal with a long duty cycle and noise? NOTHING. Every aspect of ham radio comes back down to being good stewards of a scarce resource and sharing it.
If you blast your headphones you're not going to affect me living next door. You can listen to whatever you want at any volume. If you blow out your ear drums that's your business. If you instead blast your big-ass stereo speakers now you're affecting me next door. You've got a right to blast out your eardrums, not mine.
Radio, like the air between our houses, is a shared medium. There's bands where if you want to blast signals or play around with different modes, I'll never detect it even living next door. There's also bands, like HF, where you can affect my use of the band even on opposite sides of the state. You don't have more of a right to hams bands than I do. If you want to blast high powered wide bandwidth transmissions, petition the FCC to buy a license to some spectrum (good luck).
The issue isn't graybeard hams being afraid of new fangled technology. While those do exist the much bigger issue is the whole of the HF band (and all uses of it) could fit in a single WiFi channel with room to spare. Of that tiny space hams have privileges on a tiny subsection. To even use that tiny subsection requires advanced licensing and a fair investment in equipment. Any individual user wants to put that time/money investment to use but so does every other user. It's hard to share a sliver of bandwidth if there's a couple assholes essentially blasting out noise all across that sliver of spectrum.
Hoping municipalities around the country note that the amateur radio programs they've been depreciating over the last decade actually have a role to play in emergencies like major hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.
It's just history and regulatory inertia. The rules were established when digital radio was nascent and available technology limited the modulation techniques that were feasible. Digital on some bands is regulated on bandwidth; the 70 cm band has a bandwidth limit of 100 kilohertz for "unspecified digital codes."
The 70 cm rule is the silliest. The limit for digital data is 100 kHz, but you can legally transmit 6 MHz wide analog television. Because wide bandwidth video is allowed, digital video modes like DVB-S, DVB-T and ATSC are also allowed. To get around the 100 kHz restriction for data, some folks are running links with 95% data and a low rate video sub-stream.
There are some content regulations so transmitting "in the clear" for all to read is generally demanded by the .gov.
Groundwave HF paths technologically don't have much of a symbol rate limit. You could talk from ND to SD using a quite fast symbol rate as long as its a groundwave path under 25 miles or so. There are limits, but they're huge.
Skywave "ionosphere bounce" paths have massive multipath issues although slow enough symbol rates can make it thru without too much intersymbol interference. These paths are worldwide.
Even with existing limits, its quite trivial to transmit a modulation that has too fast of a symbol rate for skywave / international paths.
I guess I'm just pointing out the existing rate limits are "too high" often for international communication. You could turn 10M into some kind of short range local wifi I suppose, but all anyone more than a hundred miles away would hear would be noise / interference due to intersymbol interference and multipath.
Supposedly, in my grandpa's day, the government regulated modulation method to a precise detailed level so if you're only allowed to transmit 45 baud ITU2 encoded rtty FSK, specifying a dozen of one or 12 of another is the same thing, just depends how you say it. Then they removed detailed mode regulation "do what you want, grandfathering in existing users".
Regulation can take awhile to change with the times. Again, supposedly in my grandpa's day, wattmeters were not accurate enough to be useful so the government regulated DC input power because voltmeters and ammeters are accurate enough for a ballpark guess. See also peak power vs "peak envelope power" aka PEP measurements for analog single sideband voice. So bringing it back around, at one point symbol rate was a reasonable proxy for old fashioned rtty fsk bandwidth regulation.
There are some papers on wideband / high speed HF communication techniques. Most applications are basically backup for military applications when satellite communication fails.
I think it's an interesting topic, but with mesh networks and satellites, HF high speed links are not as relevant.
I'm sure we all thank the FCC for its gracious permission here.
> In 2016, in response to an ARRL petition for rulemaking, the FCC proposed to remove the symbol rate limitations, which it tentatively concluded had become unnecessary due to advances in modulation techniques and no longer served a useful purpose. That proceeding, WT Docket 16-239, is still pending.
I'm certainly grateful that the custodians of such a valuable public resource as "radio communication" are taking such a deliberate, measured approach to their jobs. Just imagine the horror and chaos that could descend if we allowed higher bandwith digital comms over these frequencies... People might send porn!
(This is sarcastic, in case the bots need the hint)
> The Commission's proposed changes differed from the ARRL's initial filing and caused the ARRL to be concerned about possible interference to current users resulting from the deletion of the ARRL's requested 2.8 kHz bandwidth limitation. Due to those concerns the League filed comments with the FCC opposing the deletion of the requested bandwidth.
The ARRL is asking the FCC to not drop the rule entirely.
To get one of the big things out of the way: bandwidth. The FCC don't want anyone taking up big chunks of spectrum without using a license or service appropriate to that use. Notably, they don't want a few users to be able to chew up entire bands.
But there's a philosophical part to the discussion also. The tradeoff goes like this: hams get some really nice spectrum assignments, low fees, self-regulation, experimental modes and techniques, etc. In exchange, they can't use the amateur radio service commercially or for non-personal aims, and specifically they are expected to focus mostly on learning, community interaction, public service, experimentation, and so on. They also want amateur modes to be somewhat approachable, i.e. not requiring exotic or expensive hardware, necessarily.
Should an operator wish to use the radio spectrum for commercial or highly productive use, especially one requiring significant bandwidth, secrecy, exclusivity, etc, they are expected to use a different license / service more appropriate to those needs.
Basically:
Tinkering, chit-chat, community service, narrow bandwidths => amateur radio
Anything else => get a different license
To that end it was long the FCC's stance that high symbol rates sort of implied that you're going outside the purposes of the amateur radio service. With digital communication having developed as much as it has, though, it's reasonable that hams want to be able to do more interesting things with digital modes, which generally means higher symbol rates.
Fcc part 97.101 "General Standards" (d):
"No amateur operator shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communication or signal."
Pitiful we have to encode "the golden rule" of treat others like you'd have them treat you into law, but here we are its in the CFR.
As of 2021 no one has a technological answer to how to avoid various wide band digital technologies from interference against, well, absolutely everything else currently in use, without forcing everyone to operate in a channelized system with massive international coordination problems. The international part is a nightmare, what if, I donno, Bulgaria refuses to channelize? Nothing will work for anyone unless everyone cooperates.
Wideband digital modes do NOT play well with others.
There are channelized bands around 5 mhz (in the usa) and the FCC does relax quite a bit on wide open microwave bands, but people are going to request turning all of 20 meters into one single user digital channel, and to hell with everyone else currently using the band, apparently into infinity. Its an eternal meme.
I guess the best analogy I can come up with, is you can zone land as a public park for people to picnic, but that doesn't mean the land is completely lawless, if you blast your music at 160 dB the police will arrest you for preventing everyone else from enjoying their picnic.
We easily right now have the technological ability to turn the 20M band into a single channel, single user, very high speed digital path at 1500 watts. But that's a terrible idea, given the zillions of current users, local and international, who would be kicked off completely unable to operate.
There's very limited bandwidth available on most of the ham radio bands and other users don't want people taking up large chunks of bandwidth with wide, high-bitrate data signals and making the bands unusable for everyone else.
Presumably for the same reason that GPS time signals had (have?) pseudorandom noise added: to prevent an adversary from using your own systems to steer missiles with high precision.
You're allowed to make distress calls without a license. If it's between life or death, the rules change. Why wait for a real emergency to use your hardware though?
Everything I ever say just gets downvotes. No wonder people think HN is manipulated.. Cant see who does it, but I am reasonably sure bots operated by power uses blacklist users.. So they incrementally receive a score close or below zero.
Readit News
>The FCC also disagreed with those who argued that amateur radio licensees should be exempt from fees because of their public service contribution during emergencies and disasters.
>“[W]e we are very much aware of these laudable and important services amateur radio licensees provide to the American public,” the FCC said, but noted that specific exemptions provided under Section 8 of the so-called “Ray Baum’s Act” requiring the FCC to assess the fees do not apply to amateur radio personal licenses. “Emergency communications, for example, are voluntary and are not required by our rules,” the FCC noted. “As we have noted previously, ‘[w]hile the value of the amateur service to the public as a voluntary noncommercial communications service, particularly with respect to providing emergency communications, is one of the underlying principles of the amateur service, the amateur service is not an emergency radio service.’” [0]
https://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-reduces-proposed-amateur-radio...
The point of the license is to make sure people are treating the spectrum well, not generate revenue. I will point out similar fees are assessed to get a license to operate a car which is probably more important in an emergency.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4986...
"In 2016, in response to an ARRL petition for rulemaking, the FCC proposed to remove the symbol rate limitations, which it tentatively concluded had become unnecessary due to advances in modulation techniques and no longer served a useful purpose. That proceeding, WT Docket 16-239, is still pending."
"At all times, transmitter power must be the minimum necessary to carry out the desired communications."
http://www.arrl.org/frequency-allocations
"spread spectrum" - See above, plus raising the noise floor means the death of entire weak signal modes.
"encryption" - Absolutely no need. Would be death of ham radio. Why bother with cheap ham radio licenses if you can just transmit anything you want but encrypted.
"the bands are mostly empty" Buy a better antenna LOL.
I think you seriously mis-understand how much the "crusty old hams" know, and do, in the modern Internet: They helped build it. Not only the SL/IP and AX25 part, a lot more than just that.
Read up on KA9Q. Top hit in wikipedia is good. Now, look at the person. The wikipedia link is good. Now, go look at the company he works at, or used to. Now, open your cellphone, and look at the logo on the chipsets...
The world of HF is very different from higher bands because of propagation and low band width (especially for hams). With a well tuned antenna even a relatively modest transmitter can DX hundreds or thousands of miles.
* The low band width on HF with a high noise floor makes high symbol rates pointless throughout the band. You'd need so much FEC there'd be little benefit from the higher rates. A symbol rate that might work fine for contacts a hundred miles apart will just be noise for contacts five hundred miles away. Because of DXing on HF it's entirely possible to have your transmissions picked up across the hemisphere.
* Likewise symbol rate negotiation is problematic because of propagation. Transmissions aren't point to point links even if you're addressing a particular station. Like the point above symbol rates that work for two stations will not necessarily work for all stations that will receive the signal. That's just more noise for them and an inability to use that part of the band.
* The band width for hams on HF is too small for spread spectrum comms to be useful. Yet again transmissions that work in some conditions won't necessarily work everywhere the transmission reaches.
* Quick, what's the difference between an encrypted signal with a long duty cycle and noise? NOTHING. Every aspect of ham radio comes back down to being good stewards of a scarce resource and sharing it.
If you blast your headphones you're not going to affect me living next door. You can listen to whatever you want at any volume. If you blow out your ear drums that's your business. If you instead blast your big-ass stereo speakers now you're affecting me next door. You've got a right to blast out your eardrums, not mine.
Radio, like the air between our houses, is a shared medium. There's bands where if you want to blast signals or play around with different modes, I'll never detect it even living next door. There's also bands, like HF, where you can affect my use of the band even on opposite sides of the state. You don't have more of a right to hams bands than I do. If you want to blast high powered wide bandwidth transmissions, petition the FCC to buy a license to some spectrum (good luck).
The issue isn't graybeard hams being afraid of new fangled technology. While those do exist the much bigger issue is the whole of the HF band (and all uses of it) could fit in a single WiFi channel with room to spare. Of that tiny space hams have privileges on a tiny subsection. To even use that tiny subsection requires advanced licensing and a fair investment in equipment. Any individual user wants to put that time/money investment to use but so does every other user. It's hard to share a sliver of bandwidth if there's a couple assholes essentially blasting out noise all across that sliver of spectrum.
They seem to have literally said that. The new higher baud protocols cannot use more spectrum that the 300 baud version they approved.
Groundwave HF paths technologically don't have much of a symbol rate limit. You could talk from ND to SD using a quite fast symbol rate as long as its a groundwave path under 25 miles or so. There are limits, but they're huge.
Skywave "ionosphere bounce" paths have massive multipath issues although slow enough symbol rates can make it thru without too much intersymbol interference. These paths are worldwide.
Even with existing limits, its quite trivial to transmit a modulation that has too fast of a symbol rate for skywave / international paths.
I guess I'm just pointing out the existing rate limits are "too high" often for international communication. You could turn 10M into some kind of short range local wifi I suppose, but all anyone more than a hundred miles away would hear would be noise / interference due to intersymbol interference and multipath.
Supposedly, in my grandpa's day, the government regulated modulation method to a precise detailed level so if you're only allowed to transmit 45 baud ITU2 encoded rtty FSK, specifying a dozen of one or 12 of another is the same thing, just depends how you say it. Then they removed detailed mode regulation "do what you want, grandfathering in existing users".
Regulation can take awhile to change with the times. Again, supposedly in my grandpa's day, wattmeters were not accurate enough to be useful so the government regulated DC input power because voltmeters and ammeters are accurate enough for a ballpark guess. See also peak power vs "peak envelope power" aka PEP measurements for analog single sideband voice. So bringing it back around, at one point symbol rate was a reasonable proxy for old fashioned rtty fsk bandwidth regulation.
PS: the world needs more hams!
I think it's an interesting topic, but with mesh networks and satellites, HF high speed links are not as relevant.
Satellite has a reasonably high lower bound for implementation, and is reasonably easily disrupted.
Mesh is reliant on a relatively high density of relays; typically you need nodes within a couple of miles of each other depending on terrain.
HF allows for significantly larger mesh network node distances (with lower data rate) or much more robust communication that is harder to shut down.
> In 2016, in response to an ARRL petition for rulemaking, the FCC proposed to remove the symbol rate limitations, which it tentatively concluded had become unnecessary due to advances in modulation techniques and no longer served a useful purpose. That proceeding, WT Docket 16-239, is still pending.
I'm certainly grateful that the custodians of such a valuable public resource as "radio communication" are taking such a deliberate, measured approach to their jobs. Just imagine the horror and chaos that could descend if we allowed higher bandwith digital comms over these frequencies... People might send porn!
(This is sarcastic, in case the bots need the hint)
> The Commission's proposed changes differed from the ARRL's initial filing and caused the ARRL to be concerned about possible interference to current users resulting from the deletion of the ARRL's requested 2.8 kHz bandwidth limitation. Due to those concerns the League filed comments with the FCC opposing the deletion of the requested bandwidth.
The ARRL is asking the FCC to not drop the rule entirely.
But there's a philosophical part to the discussion also. The tradeoff goes like this: hams get some really nice spectrum assignments, low fees, self-regulation, experimental modes and techniques, etc. In exchange, they can't use the amateur radio service commercially or for non-personal aims, and specifically they are expected to focus mostly on learning, community interaction, public service, experimentation, and so on. They also want amateur modes to be somewhat approachable, i.e. not requiring exotic or expensive hardware, necessarily.
Should an operator wish to use the radio spectrum for commercial or highly productive use, especially one requiring significant bandwidth, secrecy, exclusivity, etc, they are expected to use a different license / service more appropriate to those needs.
Basically:
Tinkering, chit-chat, community service, narrow bandwidths => amateur radio
Anything else => get a different license
To that end it was long the FCC's stance that high symbol rates sort of implied that you're going outside the purposes of the amateur radio service. With digital communication having developed as much as it has, though, it's reasonable that hams want to be able to do more interesting things with digital modes, which generally means higher symbol rates.
Pitiful we have to encode "the golden rule" of treat others like you'd have them treat you into law, but here we are its in the CFR.
As of 2021 no one has a technological answer to how to avoid various wide band digital technologies from interference against, well, absolutely everything else currently in use, without forcing everyone to operate in a channelized system with massive international coordination problems. The international part is a nightmare, what if, I donno, Bulgaria refuses to channelize? Nothing will work for anyone unless everyone cooperates.
Wideband digital modes do NOT play well with others.
There are channelized bands around 5 mhz (in the usa) and the FCC does relax quite a bit on wide open microwave bands, but people are going to request turning all of 20 meters into one single user digital channel, and to hell with everyone else currently using the band, apparently into infinity. Its an eternal meme.
I guess the best analogy I can come up with, is you can zone land as a public park for people to picnic, but that doesn't mean the land is completely lawless, if you blast your music at 160 dB the police will arrest you for preventing everyone else from enjoying their picnic.
We easily right now have the technological ability to turn the 20M band into a single channel, single user, very high speed digital path at 1500 watts. But that's a terrible idea, given the zillions of current users, local and international, who would be kicked off completely unable to operate.
That said, I agree it's taking too long. The technology for the higher symbol rates is now cheap enough to be a non-issue.
How dare you do this with hardware from Amaz0on .. That you bought for this purpose and tried to make a difference..
Its unreal that we still think laws mean anything when the g0v cant keep anything running when its needed.
Oh but take our test, prove you know the bands and Ohms law.. Then save people.
In fact I can't downvote anything, What a shame.