My initial thought is that this is a cool way to try and get more resilient communications technology in the hands of those who need it most in the Global South, and it's awesome it was successfully used for a Pan Pan.
This reminds me of WinLink (an analogue to email on amateur radio), which I've heard is used by some Mariners. [1]
I'm aware that HERMES is essentially a SDR bundle/communication terminal (for a lack of a better term for a Raspberry Pi, a screen and an SDR), so it's not really re-discovering a well known amateur radio concept, but the hardware setup sounds a bit brittle on first glance, for what is essentially an emergency/critical communication application.
This is a cool project, but fyi, in the US, this would require a license to broadcast (not receive), and I am pretty sure encryption, even with a license, is not legal (again, when broadcasting from US).
I would expect this system to ultimately be used under a commercial HF license rather than an amateur license, given the feature set and that it seems to have much more in common with military systems like ALE than amateur practice. That said, because of the scarce supply of HF bandwidth, commercial HF licenses are quite restrictive in the US. For the most part, you are only allowed to apply for one if you are an infrastructure operator that needs a contingency communications capability for disaster response. That said, the FCC has permitted experimental licenses for some commercial applications like high frequency trading, so perhaps the situation will become less restrictive over time.
That said, commercial licenses are not per-operator like amateur licenses, so you would potentially only need one to cover the entire network. Some of this is ultimately negotiated.
bityard 9 hours ago [-]
Correct. Encryption (or more specifically, obscuring the meaning of a message) is generally not allowed for amateur radio stations except in very narrow circumstances. So any hams using this would have to turn the encryption off.
However, it looks like this stack has encryption available as an option for stations who are transmitting sensitive data and are NOT operating under an amateur license. (Probably government-sanctioned communications or emergency humanitarian efforts.)
nowittyusername 8 hours ago [-]
what would happen if you were to break that law? like im talking enforcement here not whats on the books.. for example torrenting and uploding copyrighted files is illegal but most people dont give a shit as enforecement is almost non existant. i know radio is taken more seriously then torrenting but this must also be very low on priority for the government unless you are jamming people or somehow stand out enough for anyone to care or notice....
wmchen 8 hours ago [-]
You're right that most amateur radio regulations are self-policed by other amateur radio operators, and true enforcement is probably rarer than folks like to imagine.
But depending on the environment (and noting that this project is specifically targeted towards communities seeking last-resort communication), there's definitely still risk, even if there isn't a spectrum authority with any real policing powers.
For example (and I say this speculatively), if you're broadcasting encrypted radio traffic in a conflict zone, it could be hard to differentiate between civilian traffic and military traffic happening on civilian bands, so you might be wrongly targeted by a drone strike.
If you already have a target on your back, radio laws can still be arbitrarily applied upon oneself, as in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was once detained on the pretense of illegally importing handheld radios. [1]
If you're curious what's allowed on the ham bands, have a listen to 7.200 MHz LSB. (If you don't have a receiver, try one on the web[0], such as this one[1].) As of writing, someone is spamming the channel with racial slurs and KKK propaganda using a soundboard.
In my experience, enforcement of the rules is unheard of.
It's not unheard of but is unfortunately rare. The FCC sent a nastygram to one of the 7.200 nuts recently.
bityard 6 hours ago [-]
In the US, FCC investigations are complaint-driven. Meaning, if you interfere with someone else's frequency, and they complain about it hard enough, the FCC will take an interest in you. Especially if you interfere with public safety. (But they will still go after the more flagrant and persistent abusers on the ham bands.)
aeturnum 6 hours ago [-]
In practice very little. The FCC tends to focus on long-lived stationary stations ("pirate" radio) with their few enforcement actions. That said it's important to remember that radio transmissions can easily be tracked to their source (doubly so with drones) and you should plan for that eventuality.
My sense is that at most you will be yelled at by HAMs - unless you are actually disrupting emergency communications. Ensuring radios can be used in emergencies is why licensing exists at all and people take ensuring it can be used for that pretty seriously (for good reason).
ErroneousBosh 8 hours ago [-]
> what would happen if you were to break that law? like im talking enforcement here not whats on the books.
In the UK, nothing. There are far more important laws to enforce.
You will get some fat whiny old guy bitching about it to anyone who will listen, but you literally could not pay Ofcom to take an interest, and there are only about two people in the whole of the UK who have the skill to do anything about it.
BoxOfRain 3 hours ago [-]
Don't Ofcom still raid the odd shortwave pirate occasionally if they're broadcasting in one of the GMDSS bands? Fairly sure it happened to a station a few years ago but I could be misremembering.
Then again, as you say, they probably have much better things to do. Would be nice to hear more stations popping up on MW too as all the legit stations leave the band.
zikduruqe 9 hours ago [-]
> except in very narrow circumstances
Usually it is for the uplink control for satellites. That you'd like to keep encrypted, so that someone does not hack your bird.
wiml 6 hours ago [-]
You really only need authentication for that, not encryption. MACs and such are okay on ham bands as I understand it. You just can't obscure the message. If you want a private channel to the exclusion of other people, license a frequency and pay for it. Spectrum is a scarce resource.
_whiteCaps_ 8 hours ago [-]
Going to be super pedantic here - in ham radio you don't broadcast, you transmit.
mesh 7 hours ago [-]
Yes! Broadcasting is prohibited!
(and this all reminded I need to renew my license which I haven't used in about 8 years! Looks like I also need a refresher!)
kanbankaren 4 hours ago [-]
What is the difference between the two?
A ham operator might put out 20W of ERP while a radio station operates at 100W though international broadcasters use upto 500 kW.
drivers99 3 hours ago [-]
Part 97 defines broadcasting as "Transmissions intended for reception by the general public, either direct or relayed."
Then there's a section that says:
> An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules
Since "broadcasting" is prohibited (except for the exceptions), there is a distinction. There actually are a number of exceptions that allow different kinds of one-way transmissions though.
mesh 4 hours ago [-]
In the US with an amateur radio license you can have one to one communication (transmit) but not one to many (broadcast).
lacunary 1 hours ago [-]
hmm, been a minute since I got my ticket, but neither calling CQ nor working a net seem like one to one.
scarecrowbob 59 minutes ago [-]
Isn't it the case that it's not a CQ unless someone responds?
Like, the response is kind of important for either a CQ or a net... whereas if I broadcast a pirate radio I am doing what I am trying to do just by sending.
If it's a matter of life and death, such as offshore fishing, you probably want a real commercial service.
Like Garmin (Iridium based texts back and forth) or Zoleo. These are physical units that may offer texts or just a simple "sos" button.
Or a recent iPhone will communicate with Starlink, or T-Mobile offers a similar system for Android phones and is also based on Starlink. These can exchange texts which is much more reassuring than a simple sos button.
Of course offerings outside the US may be limited or entirely absent.
reaperducer 5 hours ago [-]
If it's a matter of life and death, such as offshore fishing, you probably want a real commercial service.
Like Garmin (Iridium based texts back and forth) or Zoleo. These are physical units that may offer texts or just a simple "sos" button.
Prohibitively expensive, and also not available to 90% of the planet's commercial fishermen.
For them, an iPhone can be an entire year's profit.
The people in TFA aren't going to be featured on The Deadliest Crab.
markdown 7 hours ago [-]
These are essential for remote solo hiking.
BlackRabbit1 10 hours ago [-]
> Why did you build in encryption that amateur-radio regulations in many countries don’t allow?
Encryption (in terms of hiding messages) is forbidden mostly.
But everything else is allowed: hashes, signing, etc.
Even the legislators really understand it. They are allowing encryption for remote controlling ham satellites. With proper signing even that would not be necessary (with only exception of key rotations maybe).
throw0101c 8 hours ago [-]
On the etymology of the name of the project, see Greek mythology:
> Hermes (/ˈhɜːrmiːz/; Ancient Greek: Ἑρμῆς) is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology considered the herald of the gods. He is also widely considered the protector of human heralds, travelers, thieves,[2] merchants, and orators.[3][4] He is able to move quickly and freely between the worlds of the mortal and the divine aided by his winged sandals.
Coincidentally I looked into this the other day and the fastest mode is 3 kilobit/s. Great for email but it's not going to be an Internet connection.
kragen 9 hours ago [-]
I haven't used this radio, but I have definitely used a 2.4-kilobit-per-second internet connection productively. Raw TCP/IP with SLIP or PPP will work, and with VJ header compression it works reasonably well. What won't work well is loading a web page with a bunch of images and a megabyte of JavaScript.
nowittyusername 8 hours ago [-]
If you have local stt and tts voice stack on the phone, this would be very useful as the interface to talk to your agent back at home. All inference happens on your local machine while the actual information is sent via text. said text is then processed by your phone via tts as output, same for your voice as input (asr). this project is actually something ive considered doing myself as my voice agent is almost done and ive wanted to take a look and see if i could have acess to him from anywhere in the world..
BlackRabbit1 10 hours ago [-]
If you want to have internet everywhere there is Starlink. Competing against it as hobbyist is a waste of time.
But having a small, low-power, lightweight messenger that uses an extremely robust (and thereby slow) mode to send and receive messages is an interesting niche. For VHF/UHF/SHF you can use LoRa.
Considering the state of the higher bands lately, i'd stick with commercial solutions like garmin inreach for any kind of emergency situations.
For playing with ham radio, you can just play with ham radio, it's been done for decades. No encryption on ham bands anyway.
ck2 10 hours ago [-]
doesn't HAM radio already have a digital packet system that works like fidonet store-and-forward system?
this just adds an encryption layer?
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
Ham is not an acronym, no need to capitalize it. It’s slang for an amateur radio user.
wmf 10 hours ago [-]
AX.25 runs at 300 bps over HF while Mercury is 10x faster.
BlandDuck 8 hours ago [-]
Ham radio also has the FT8 protocol which is optimized for bad signal to noise environments, but has low bandwidth. However, using this protocol a 10Watt radio has global reach under the right conditions, which is pretty mind boggling.
About encryption, the US rules are that you can use digital protocols but you must publish the specs so anyone can, in principle, decode the signal.
cge 8 hours ago [-]
>the US rules are that you can use digital protocols but you must publish the specs so anyone can, in principle, decode the signal.
This restriction does not appear to actually be enforced, eg, if I recall correctly the VARA HF/FM modes do not have published specs anywhere near sufficient to decode them, to the point where there are projects trying to reverse engineer them.
fragmede 9 hours ago [-]
HAM radio isn't allowed to have encryption. (Someone can write a longer comment on why thats wrong.)
encrypted
One of these things is not like the other.
Organization page: https://www.rhizomatica.org/about/
My initial thought is that this is a cool way to try and get more resilient communications technology in the hands of those who need it most in the Global South, and it's awesome it was successfully used for a Pan Pan.
This reminds me of WinLink (an analogue to email on amateur radio), which I've heard is used by some Mariners. [1]
I'm aware that HERMES is essentially a SDR bundle/communication terminal (for a lack of a better term for a Raspberry Pi, a screen and an SDR), so it's not really re-discovering a well known amateur radio concept, but the hardware setup sounds a bit brittle on first glance, for what is essentially an emergency/critical communication application.
[1]: https://winlink.org/
And then only on certain bands:
https://www.arrl.org/files/file/Regulatory/Band%20Chart/Hamb...
That said, commercial licenses are not per-operator like amateur licenses, so you would potentially only need one to cover the entire network. Some of this is ultimately negotiated.
However, it looks like this stack has encryption available as an option for stations who are transmitting sensitive data and are NOT operating under an amateur license. (Probably government-sanctioned communications or emergency humanitarian efforts.)
But depending on the environment (and noting that this project is specifically targeted towards communities seeking last-resort communication), there's definitely still risk, even if there isn't a spectrum authority with any real policing powers.
For example (and I say this speculatively), if you're broadcasting encrypted radio traffic in a conflict zone, it could be hard to differentiate between civilian traffic and military traffic happening on civilian bands, so you might be wrongly targeted by a drone strike.
If you already have a target on your back, radio laws can still be arbitrarily applied upon oneself, as in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was once detained on the pretense of illegally importing handheld radios. [1]
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/aung-san-suu-kyi-myanmar-asia-ap-...
In my experience, enforcement of the rules is unheard of.
[0]: http://websdr.org/ [1]: http://websdr.k3fef.com:8901/
My sense is that at most you will be yelled at by HAMs - unless you are actually disrupting emergency communications. Ensuring radios can be used in emergencies is why licensing exists at all and people take ensuring it can be used for that pretty seriously (for good reason).
In the UK, nothing. There are far more important laws to enforce.
You will get some fat whiny old guy bitching about it to anyone who will listen, but you literally could not pay Ofcom to take an interest, and there are only about two people in the whole of the UK who have the skill to do anything about it.
Then again, as you say, they probably have much better things to do. Would be nice to hear more stations popping up on MW too as all the legit stations leave the band.
Usually it is for the uplink control for satellites. That you'd like to keep encrypted, so that someone does not hack your bird.
(and this all reminded I need to renew my license which I haven't used in about 8 years! Looks like I also need a refresher!)
A ham operator might put out 20W of ERP while a radio station operates at 100W though international broadcasters use upto 500 kW.
Then there's a section that says:
> An amateur station shall not engage in any form of broadcasting, nor may an amateur station transmit one-way communications except as specifically provided in these rules
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-97#p-97.113(b)
Since "broadcasting" is prohibited (except for the exceptions), there is a distinction. There actually are a number of exceptions that allow different kinds of one-way transmissions though.
Like, the response is kind of important for either a CQ or a net... whereas if I broadcast a pirate radio I am doing what I am trying to do just by sending.
Like Garmin (Iridium based texts back and forth) or Zoleo. These are physical units that may offer texts or just a simple "sos" button.
Or a recent iPhone will communicate with Starlink, or T-Mobile offers a similar system for Android phones and is also based on Starlink. These can exchange texts which is much more reassuring than a simple sos button.
Of course offerings outside the US may be limited or entirely absent.
Like Garmin (Iridium based texts back and forth) or Zoleo. These are physical units that may offer texts or just a simple "sos" button.
Prohibitively expensive, and also not available to 90% of the planet's commercial fishermen.
For them, an iPhone can be an entire year's profit.
The people in TFA aren't going to be featured on The Deadliest Crab.
Encryption (in terms of hiding messages) is forbidden mostly.
But everything else is allowed: hashes, signing, etc.
Even the legislators really understand it. They are allowing encryption for remote controlling ham satellites. With proper signing even that would not be necessary (with only exception of key rotations maybe).
> Hermes (/ˈhɜːrmiːz/; Ancient Greek: Ἑρμῆς) is an Olympian deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology considered the herald of the gods. He is also widely considered the protector of human heralds, travelers, thieves,[2] merchants, and orators.[3][4] He is able to move quickly and freely between the worlds of the mortal and the divine aided by his winged sandals.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes
Rough Roman equivalent:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(mythology)
But having a small, low-power, lightweight messenger that uses an extremely robust (and thereby slow) mode to send and receive messages is an interesting niche. For VHF/UHF/SHF you can use LoRa.
For playing with ham radio, you can just play with ham radio, it's been done for decades. No encryption on ham bands anyway.
this just adds an encryption layer?
About encryption, the US rules are that you can use digital protocols but you must publish the specs so anyone can, in principle, decode the signal.
This restriction does not appear to actually be enforced, eg, if I recall correctly the VARA HF/FM modes do not have published specs anywhere near sufficient to decode them, to the point where there are projects trying to reverse engineer them.
https://www.rac.ca/encryption/