trangus_1985

Trying to avoid proprietary things, where possible. Especially at the protocol/application layer.

Lora and other chirp based protocols are incredibly cool, and I've been playing with them

> the channels are controlled and watched

Do you think that ham radio couldn't be? Or isn't? What you really want is privacy, authz/authn concerns, and decentralization, it sounds like. And TCP/IP is about as useful as a "PHY" layer for your application as is ham radio.

Plus, solutions like what you're describing require a relative ease of use - unless you only want to talk to the 17 other people in your geographical area who have similar technical backgrounds.

Yeah, I definitely think they come from an era where we all didn't have a pocket communicator that plugs us into any community at will.

When I flung packets across the bay with a friend, we used cell phones to figure out antenna positioning and alignment. violating the spirit of the intention of these rules, imo, but hard to say

Yes, but ham radio is all about being open and a community of people communicating together.

And if that's the use case you want, you should look elsewhere.... At least, that's what the people leading the ham radio community and arrl say.

I'm not sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure I disagree either. I certainly think the community aspect is less important today due to the internet, but it's probably still crucial.

It took me almost a decade to become licensed because I couldn't find any tests that weren't at 9am on a sunday, an hour drive away. Maybe that seems like a low bar, because it is!

But, I got into ham radio to do interesting things, and not communicate. After all, why bother with making sure you have line of sight to a repeater when you can just fire off a text message? I'm much more interested in telemetry, instrumentation, and remote control.

> illegal to transmit encrypted data over the air

While a massive restriction, you can prevent interference (but not eavesdropping!) by signing your payloads. Maybe it's because ham radio and privacy aware people is a venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but it feels like perfect being the enemy of good.

I said 40 years for a reason ;) But yes, those laws were horrible, and stifled innovation.

> Fine, whatever, their house their rules

When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".

Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

But you can "buy less stuff" in general. And that will reduce your impact.

I'm not entirely convinced that fully disconnecting is necessary, although it is nice. Instead, I take an old phone without any work stuff on it, and go moto camping. Occasionally, messages will come in from friends and family, and I can respond to them.

But the most important thing, imo, is not attaching yourself to outside responsibilities for a few days.

>I think the only time I've found people this far off the main track is users that only know C#/mono coming from Unity Engine.

Damn, almost direct hit. I was a game developer for a year or so about 10 years ago. We were using xna.

Frankly, I don't remember. It's been a long time and using .net was a failed experiment.

>Why were you targeting mono then?

Well here's another issue with .net I ran into... really unclear guidance from numerous sources who all really wanted you to use THEIR stack and thus end up paying THEM.

I did multiple things, multiple attempts to make it work. I tried to do it "the right way" from various sources.

The reason I was targeting mono at some point was because I wanted to run a microservice, without paying windows server licenses fees, and as best I can tell, that was the root runtime I'd need to target.

Keep in mind that this was me, going in blind into a large and established ecosystem. I don't think going astray detracts from some of my bigger complaints, such as the poor quality of community open source libraries.

Ah yeah, I was using core I think. Sorry, it's been a while, I kinda glazed over the acronyms and names over time. Since it was my own project, I really was trying to do things "the modern way".

Yes, I quite like C#, the language. That's why I put so much effort into trying to make it work - it's become one of my favorite languages!