|
Dolemite posted:As an aside, I'm curious what is "amateurish" about amateur radio? What is it called amateur? Furthermore, amateur radio is not a "broadcast" medium--it's stricly meant for point-to-point transmissions where you expect (or at least attempt) to communicate with someone. The fact that third parties can pick up these transmissions is an incidental fact of how radio transmissions work. The point is that you're not suppose to blab out advertisements or whatever "for the masses", that's what commercial radio is for. Plus, the whole point of amateur radio is to provide an incentive for a reasonable proportion of the general population (i.e., those who are not radio professionals) to maintain knowlege of and access to radio equipment so that we may depend on them in emergencies and disaster scenarios. And as any ham who has participated in a safety, mock disaster, or even a real emergency net knows, amateurs are really good as running them. Dolemite posted:And that begs the question: What is "professional" radio? Is that FM radio run by Clear Channel or something? There's a bunch of interesting points about amateur radio licensing, but the three I find particularly amusing are:
Edit: One more interesitng license fact, you're not allowed to obfuscate your transmission in any way that would prevent a third party from being able to interpret it. I imagine this was to avoid people using voice scramblers or the likes, but it has interesting implications for 802.11. 802.11 (WiFi) uses the ISM band. As it turns out, this portion of the 2.4 GHz space is primarilly licensed for amateur use. So it's totally kosher to take an 802.11 radio, put an amplifier on it and use it to increase transmission power (and thus, reception distance) so long as you're obliging all other amateur radio requirements (such as throwing your callsign in a ping packet every ten minutes). However, a strict interpretation of the license means you can't use encryption--so ssh and https are out, although it's not quite clear if this is actually the case. ExcessBLarg! fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Apr 17, 2008 |
#
¿
Apr 17, 2008 02:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:35 |
|
|
YouTuber posted:How exactly can anyone track whether or not you repeat your callsign every 10 minutes or so? If you don't what exactly are they going to do about it? Usually you have to grossly violate the rules, for a long period of time, for the FCC to actually hunt you down. Although, the FCC will do so if needed (like they tend to go after pirate radio stations). I imagine the only scenario in which the callsign rule would be actively enforced would be if a repeater (which squats on a frequency for a very long time--pretty much indefinitely) was failing to identify itself, then folks would make an active effort to contact the owner to have the repeater properly ID itself, involving the FCC if need be. But the point of amateur radio is not to skirt around the rules, or to try to meet them to the letter but not in spirit. The rules are motivated by courtesy and safety, and failure to adhere to them is either outright dangerous, or an insult to the community. That's really the reason why people follow them--yeah, you could probably get away with not doing so and little would happen in the short term. But most license holders view it as a privilege, and are proud to be a member of the community, so the disingenuous mentality really just isn't prevalent.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2008 05:52
|
|