this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I don't think smart phones are conventional communications. The are smart. They are still the "tech of tomorrow".
Smart phones use conventional communications to do very clever things. But those clever things are range limited and require specialised equipment. They also have absolutely no "hackability" without specialised equipment (easy to get, sure... But still pretty much single purpose)
AM is literally a couple caps, inductors, resistors (edit: and diode) then an amplifier (a couple transistors and resistors). And the range of lower frequency radio waves is (or can be) phenomenal.
It's just that it takes some experience to operate on these frequencies, and their bandwidth is limited.
Smart phones do away with the experience requirements, and trade higher frequencies & higher data rates for range (and I guess trade digital encoding for simplicity)
I see parallels to software.
People are nervous to "side loading apps" on their phone, but have no issues downloading and installing an exe on windows.
Smart phones give you the "this is how" kind of experience, and abstract away the sheer amount of technology they leverage. Which is amazing, and is what makes them smart!
But the underlying technology is phenomenal. And I feel it's a shame that the majority of people don't have any understanding of "installing an app" or similar (like calling internet access "WiFi".... 2 distinct things!)
Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level) and passes a test to acquire a license. Some of the equipment can either kill you or cause way too much interference potentially killing others indirectly
Huh. I wonder how you do that. If the wind knocked down a tree and the tree killed someone, would the wind indirectly have killed someone? That’s kind of like the old adage “speed doesn’t kill, it’s the sudden stop”
If you're fucking around with your radio equipment doing something you shouldn't and end up causing interference on, for example, aircraft frequencies or emergency service radio systems, you could be a contributing factor to an airliner crashing or an ambulance not being dispatched in a timely manner and a patient dying because they didn't get to the hospital in time.
You didn't directly kill anyone, but you set up the circumstances that resulted in someone dying.
It's not that hard to use ham radio equipment to screw with things like aviation com/nav radios and the like.
Same reason why power-line can do that; interference with emergency services radio.