Inauguralposting
One very interesting exception to the HAM permitting requirement: MURS, a retired leased license space for commercial & industrial handhelds that reverted to public control. Five VHF bands between 151-154kHz. Anywhere it's legal to use a CB, it's legal to use MURS, which is surprisingly flexible for not needing a license. Buying a cheap toy walkie-talkie from Amazon and modifying it to send digital signals is in almost all cases illegal by the letter of the law. There's just a lot of intuitive tinkering that's disallowed at the federal level. But with MURS you can have digital, you can have detachable antennas and TNCs, you can have aerials sixty-five feet high. All unlicensed.
The catch? It's not lack of encryption, that's all public airwaves. For MURS, a two watt limit: this isn't restrictive for being unlicensed, that's a range measured in miles, even on handhelds. The big downside is that MURS can't be used for 'store and forward' operations. Meaning packet switching. And subnetting. And most networking as understood to meet the contemporary definition of that term, really.
What's left? This and that. Not having encryption available doesn't mean you can't have encoding. Look up Rattlegram. Is the future? To me it seems like it. The logical evolution. Antenna, tuner, and an aux out to the ICs.
There are HAMs online who will try to menace people out of this kind of experimentation. Even HAMs who don't outwardly consider MURS beneath them materially have no use for it - why go through all the trouble of getting licensed to work in such a restricted space? And too many makers think 'oh goodness oh heavens I cannot go to jail' but there are MANY illegal MURS repeaters up and down I-81, and some have been up for a decade or more. Explicitly disallowed repeaters, over the power limit! How do the operators get away with it? By not creating interference!!! Boomer hall monitors with expensive radios who talk to other boomer hall monitors with expensive radios are fewer and fewer. The rare one might have a connected friend, but the FCC is interested foremost with interference; they are understaffed and and their priorities only situationally align with the Norbert Cunninghams.
Decent and extendable range, suitability of the wavelength to portable gear, lack of licensing requirements and lack of higher networking features would seem to make MURS not irrelevant in the mode of a sneakernet/smallnet convergence. A prohibition on store and forward operations is something applied to network functionality, it doesn't govern a succession of manual client-server connections undertaken by the operator.
Imagine: all units transceivers, beacon pings reveal nearby nodes, epostcards not email, nodes host walls/guestbooks/boards and arbitrary text/cgi, rendered device hash linked to each node name provides simple verifiability in lieu of encryption, effortless whole or partial mirroring of encountered nodes acts as the manual sneakernet retransmission required to stay within the letter of the law.Anyway, that's my vote for restrictive but mostly unused 1200 baud VHF.
Jan 22 · 3 months ago
6 Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · Jan 22 at 14:00:
*MHz
I always encourage folks who want to tinker to just get a HAM license. More power, more modes, more spectrum. Yeah it sucks because studying for and taking a test is not something everyone will want to do. Not useful for family and friends unless they are patient.
MURS can permit TNCs but no digipeating. Great for a hike in the woods to keep a big group in communication. There used to be a product that enabled this. It was called Gotenna. The first generation used MURS. Then they went to 900 MHz, the ISM band, where they could do store and forward, like Meshtastic and Meshcore. They've exited the consumer space last I knew.
I think with a hand held, miles is a bit of a stretch, unless it is mountain top to mountain top. But attach it to a big, tall antenna and you'll be getting miles and miles.
The thing that sucks is handheld units work best with repeaters. This is true for just about anything. You're not getting much past the neighborhood in most circumstances with a handheld on stock antenna.
A basic J pole (you can build this for about $20 in parts) in a tree will give you a few miles.
I hope the unregulated bands actually get some utilization.
I find the smugness of the HAM community somewhat unpleasant. But to be fair, it is no worse than say, Lisp community. The licensing standard -- the so-called test -- is a bit of a joke, but at least everyone here knows what an antenna is -- better than a random sample of our population.
But I also find a strange pride in registering with the government, doxing yourself (unless you want to pay for a POBox), and threatening normies with FCC police for not following government regulations (which occasionally do make sense).
I am not sure what the restrictions for this band are for (other than slowing down the proliferation of unregulated usage and pushing people into licensing)
Fundamentally, in a SHTF scenarios, having access to a radio is a matter of importance. Being registered means that in certain situations, someone will come looking for you because you are a threat or an asset. Now it is not something I think about much, but I do have some HAM equipment and certainly will never get a license. Don't worry, I do not broadcast. Just crank it up once a year, listen to a couple of conversations, and remember why I find the whole HAM thing kind of boring.
👻 darkghost · Jan 22 at 20:13:
Like anything, there's a lot of gatekeeping. It is why I don't participate on air much. I'm well below the average age of 70 and generally have my head screwed on properly. (There are some wild on air conversations around here.) These are both excluding traits.
The licensing standard is more rigorous than the required-in-my-state firearm safety class. I participated in one of those and a gentleman in the back slept through the class and took 6 times to pass the multiple choice exam. The exam was, to me, the application of common sense around any potentially dangerous object.
The restrictions on this service are the same for any unlicensed service like CB, FRS, or ISM and the end goal is to keep communications local. Keep power low and capabilities low to avoid screwing up on a large area. HF can propagate globally, meaning one can be an intercontinental jerk ruining it for everybody. CB is limited to 4 watts AM/FM, MURS is limited to 2 watts, FRS is 5 watts/0.5 watts with a fixed antenna, and ISM is dependent on application (technically a microwave oven operates here at 1.5 kW but doesn't broadcast.) You would be hard pressed to get more than 10 miles on any of these unless you're on a mountain.
Unless you advertise you're a HAM, in SHTF nobody will be able to query the FCC database and check. I don't advertise because of the whole doxing yourself, I only state it when I'm on air. I also view radio as essential in this scenario and there is no legal way to practice without a license. In situations of danger to life you can transmit without a license. But you won't know what you're doing because listening and transmitting are separate skills. Learning in an emergency is a bad time to be learning.
I wonder if there is an easy way to retrofit a microwave oven to a 1.5kW pirate station!
I always crack at youtube's NonRubicon guy teasing HAMs and talking about how, if you really want to have conversations with strange men, go ahead and get your license... Not that there is anything wrong with that.
👻 darkghost · Jan 23 at 01:35:
Sad HAMs!
I don't know why, but the guy cracks me up!
It took me a while to notice that he edits all the eye blinks out of his videos for that extra-reptilian presense.
I appreciate the amusing kind of a prick.