Xkeyscore; i can see I don’t like this but don’t have the knowledge to understand the thing.
But I have another thing nagging me. Nellie Ohr and that HAM license. Another FreeQ brought this up yesterday or the day before. Nellie has a low level license. I’ve got the same level. My youngest daughter passed the exam and got her license at age 11. Love my baby but she was not a good student. Sometimes I was just thankful for an all C report card from that one. Point being, easy test, not many bands, no far reaching capability. It’s just not useful for much except very close local communications. It’s line of sight communication between antennas..or repeaters. There is something we aren’t catching about the significance of HAM Nell.
There is something we aren’t catching about the significance of HAM Nell.
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Interesting - makes sense... wonder what it might be.
McCain’s guy, Steven Schmitt, is the license holder/station operator for several DMR (Digital Mobile Radio) repeaters in the Northern Virginia area. These repeaters are linked to a nationwide network and pass their digital signals as packets in the internet. The hand-held two-way radios are a pain to program and rely on a set of instructions particular to the repeater called a “Code Plug”. Right now, there isn’t much traffic on these networks and the signals sound like noise to anyone without the correct code plug.
A radio pro could probably add a layer of encryption (illegal) to the DMR code and make them unreadable by the casual amateur radio operator listening in.
I am sure Nellie had a radio handed to her to use at specific times on specific channels. That is all it takes.
However, the FCC/NSA *probably* digitizes and archives the broadband and they could go back and listen to these signals and decode them after the fact if they suspected foul play. The legality of such monitoring is unknown to me.
RE: HAM Nellie
Is there an inspection clause reserved by the FCC in the granted license? How would they know if she “upgraded” her equipment after she got her license?
What if the equipment (or upgrade) was for another, higher level HAM operator and she just “housed” the equipment at her place in VA?
Andy said: “These repeaters are linked to a nationwide network and pass their digital signals as packets in the internet.”
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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
“There is something we aren’t catching about the significance of HAM Nell.”
I saw not too long ago where someone ran a bunch of DS names through an FCC Ham license search and a whole bunch of them had one. I don’t recall where I saw it, possibly 8chan