Andy said: “These repeaters are linked to a nationwide network and pass their digital signals as packets in the internet.”
~~~~~~~~~
Not just nationwide, but to a lot of places around the globe. Although, as I said previously, the Technician-class license is fairly restrictive on frequencies and power levels, repeaters that connect to the Internet have become very inexpensive and very common (almost too common).
- The fact is, one can sit in their backyard in many places with a cheap ($30), low-power, handheld ‘walkie talkie’ and hit a local repeater. If that repeater is connected to the web or other equipment, that low-power handheld can bounce through a string of repeaters or weblinks and come out on a repeater in Europe, South America, or elsewhere.
- Recently, I had conversation from the US Southwest to Australia on a vehicle-mounted radio (25 Watts) that had a line-of-sight range of about 10 miles, but through a repeater was essentially unlimited.
- Under all classes of license, hams can send digital traffic with comparatively slow baud rate, but okay for text-type-messages, over the air, over repeaters, from a home computer, across satellites, and even by bouncing signals off the moon.
- Satellites? You bet. Hams can transmit a message to certain satellites when it passes overhead, and a user on the other side of the world can download the message when the bird passes over their location.
- That means it would be very easy to ‘hide’ messages with innocuous codewords among witting participants without any digital encryption or ‘rule breaking’. You can also transmit pictures which brings steganography into the conversation (again).
[Just look at the first letter of each of my bulleted points above for an example] [snicker]
Pretty incredible and neat capabilities. With the volume of ‘stuff’ going through the air, almost impossible for the FCC to enforce any rules unless they want to. And, as I also said previously, under Hussein the FCC had zero interest in enforcement.
K
Bob Ley, ESPN: 6-months off to “recharge”
Thank you Kit, I'm pretty sure it was you who brought this up a thread or two ago and got me thinking about it again. As Cletus questioned in post 479, if folks aren't honest, there's no FCC enforcement on who uses the equipment. There's no reason tech Nellie couldn't have all the fancy equipment (that I can't afford) and do whatever she wants worldwide. Or allow foreign agents the use of said equipment. Truly, under Zero, why did she bother to get the tech license? The capability is there to just use.
This may not have been a very important piece of information in the big picture, but it has nagged at me.
Thanks for the discourse on hams, KitJ. Did not know that about the repeaters. What you say makes a lot of sense.