"Jayson Davis" wrote in message
...
No, that's not true. You only create specific services that allow
outbound Internet access. Certainly, you'd filter the living snot for
web services so about the only place they could go would be arrl.org.

I think you can do a lot better than that. Put up some standard commercial
piece of software that filters out known porn sites, etc., and get everyone to
sign up with a valid call sign before granting them access, and go to town.
Yes, the control operator is still responsible for people misbehaving, but I
think a realistic viewpoint is that if you get people to agree to abiding by
the FCC's rules and clearly have made some effort (with the filter software)
to enforce rules, and immediately yank access from people who abuse the
system, you'd be fine.

After all, it's not like repeater owners are forced to take down repeaters
just because some yahoo doesn't follow FCC rules when using it, right?

There are a lot of people out there who seem far more concerned with the exact
letter of the law than the actual intent...

I don't know why people assume high speed data over amateur radio means
an influx of people wanting to use the Internet.

I agree; I don't think it'd be a huge influx. Small, if anything. But a very
satisfying change for those of us who WANT to use amateur radio and the
Internet when we're mobile or otherwise out of the range of public WiFi access
points. (About a month ago I started a thread on the Yahoo! digital radio
group discussing the idea that you'd get WiFi at 'some megabits per second'
when you're close to a lot of infrastructure, 'hundreds of kilobits per
second' when you're working repeaters some tens of miles away in the amateur
bands, and some 'tens of kilobits per second' when you're literally in the
middle of nowhere using systems such as WinLink on the HF bands.)

Lots of college age
kids have become quite knowledgeable about microwaves and RF by
experimenting with their 802.11 wireless gear.

Yes and no. I have seen some very impressive boards made by 'amateur WiFiers'
out there, but realistically the most 'interesting' parts of a 2.4GHz ISM band
radio is all on-chip, and I think you can count on one hand how many people
have the ability to homebrew some RFICs in their basements or after standard
working hours at their employers. Part of the attraction for me with amateur
radio is that you can sit down and build a complete HF (or even 6m or 2m)
transceiver a transistor at a time and have its performance be reasonable
close to what you'd get from an off-the-shelf radio -- sometimes even better!
This just doesn't happen with WiFi. The majority of homebrew WiFi stuff you
see out there is within the realm of digital (i.e., the projects use some chip
that takes in RF and spits out bits -- no RF design necessary... in fact, a
lot of the projects out there interface to a PCMCIA or PCI WiFi _card_!).
While I think amateur radio is probably heading that way as well , performing
analog design for RF processing is much more accessible in amateur radio.

Granted, you could argue that amateurs generally don't make their own
transistors either, but my point is that the level of 'hacking' available to
amateurs can go down to a much lower level than it can with WiFi. There's no
such thing as the 'all discrete component Altoids tin WiFi project.'

I do think there are certain parallels in that the vast majority of people who
are 'into' WiFi are just folks looking to _use_ the technology; they only want
to learn enough about cantennas so that they can successfully link with their
buddy on the other side of town; I think this is true with many hams as
well... and there's nothing wrong with it.

Or, you can let them do their thing, gain their knowledge and push
amateur radio into further irrelevancy. I think we all know where the
prevailing winds are blowing.

Having just returned from Dayton, I'm really not worried that amateur radio is
going to become completely irrelevant any time soon. Not even in a couple
decades from now. By then, I think the FCC regulations will have changed so
drastically that it's pointless to discuss.

---Joel Kolstad