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).
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.)
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....
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.
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]
The licence is not a hurdle. HF licencing in Canada is simple. You get the transmitter certified ($500) and then you rent the spectrum licence. Since there is actually not much demand for HF spectrum it's quite cheap. If you plan to use it domestically it's the same process as like licensing a single 25 kHz VHF channel for a walkie-talkie. And on licensed channel you can encrypt if you want.
But putting a useful transmission on air is expensive. Commercial long-distance shortwave transmitters are megawatt-class. That seems to be the biggest barrier. It turns out to be much cheaper and easier to provide an unreliable 10 kHz channel between A and B through almost any other means.
That said: it's clear there's an uptick in data transmission on shortwave over the last ~decade or so. Get a broadband SDR receiver and look at the spectrum waterfall. Here's a capture live from an SDR in New Zealand: https://i.imgur.com/NfFBO34.png
Between 8250 and 8300 kHz and slightly more faintly centred at 8200, and also at 8150 see the 50 kHz wide spectrum bands of /// rising diagonal lines?
That is a 50 kHz wide channel. Which is broadband in the context of HF when voice band is 3 kHz. It's some kind of spread-spectrum chirp modulation. I've seen broadband OFDM on air as well at extremely low baud like 1 baud but presumably many channels and possible frequencies.
Throughput depends entirely on the levels of error correction etc. but the Shannon limit for a 50 kHz channel at low noise is like ~200 kbps. Well beyond sending some weather reports and teletype data.
Who? Probably military. Spread spectrum techniques are illegal in Canada and the US at least, on HF, for both amateur and commercial users.
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.
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.
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..
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Original project page: https://hermes.radio/ (Code: https://mercury.hermes.radio/)
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/
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).
And then only on certain bands:
https://www.arrl.org/files/file/Regulatory/Band%20Chart/Hamb...
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.)
Usually it is for the uplink control for satellites. That you'd like to keep encrypted, so that someone does not hack your bird.
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....
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.
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]
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/aung-san-suu-kyi-myanmar-asia-ap-...
Going to be super pedantic here - in ham radio you don't broadcast, you transmit.
https://n5dux.com/ham/files/pdf/Data%20Encryption%20is%20Leg...
The licence is not a hurdle. HF licencing in Canada is simple. You get the transmitter certified ($500) and then you rent the spectrum licence. Since there is actually not much demand for HF spectrum it's quite cheap. If you plan to use it domestically it's the same process as like licensing a single 25 kHz VHF channel for a walkie-talkie. And on licensed channel you can encrypt if you want.
But putting a useful transmission on air is expensive. Commercial long-distance shortwave transmitters are megawatt-class. That seems to be the biggest barrier. It turns out to be much cheaper and easier to provide an unreliable 10 kHz channel between A and B through almost any other means.
That said: it's clear there's an uptick in data transmission on shortwave over the last ~decade or so. Get a broadband SDR receiver and look at the spectrum waterfall. Here's a capture live from an SDR in New Zealand: https://i.imgur.com/NfFBO34.png
Between 8250 and 8300 kHz and slightly more faintly centred at 8200, and also at 8150 see the 50 kHz wide spectrum bands of /// rising diagonal lines?
That is a 50 kHz wide channel. Which is broadband in the context of HF when voice band is 3 kHz. It's some kind of spread-spectrum chirp modulation. I've seen broadband OFDM on air as well at extremely low baud like 1 baud but presumably many channels and possible frequencies.
Throughput depends entirely on the levels of error correction etc. but the Shannon limit for a 50 kHz channel at low noise is like ~200 kbps. Well beyond sending some weather reports and teletype data.
Who? Probably military. Spread spectrum techniques are illegal in Canada and the US at least, on HF, for both amateur and commercial users.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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).
doesn't HAM radio already have a digital packet system that works like fidonet store-and-forward system?
this just adds an encryption layer?
AX.25 runs at 300 bps over HF while Mercury is 10x faster.
HAM radio isn't allowed to have encryption. (Someone can write a longer comment on why thats wrong.)
Depends on your jurisdiction. In Canada it's allowed if you publish your keys.
https://www.rac.ca/encryption/
https://n5dux.com/ham/files/pdf/Data%20Encryption%20is%20Leg...
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.
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.
Sounds a lot like something that could be used with https://reticulum.network to create networks that support multiple mediums.
I did not yet watch the full video, but Data Slayer on Youtube made a video about this, I guess. It's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vbl5FL-nsI
The Data Slayer channel on Youtube made an interesting video about this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vbl5FL-nsI
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.
On the etymology of the name of the project, see Greek mythology:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes
Rough Roman equivalent:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(mythology)