Interesting, I see that Pactor III protocol is published at http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulations/techchar/PACTOR-III.html
I believe that as with D-STAR, portions of the signal might be proprietary, but the envelope protocol is published and specifically the station identification is documented. The encoding portion of Pactor III could be considered similar to that of the AMBE vocoder. As to SSL encryption, I believe that the response may be similar to that of the High Speed Data Committee on the 802.11abc protocols. The word encryption does not appear in Part 97, but the word obscure does. Part 97.309(b) specifies what is permitted and it can be indeed interpreted in a number of ways. Probably the most interesting is 97.309(b)(3) that indicates that if asked, the original information must be provided. This would indicate to some that encryption is actually expected. Ed WA4YIH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nate Duehr Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 8:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Tactical Call indication On Tue, 19 May 2009 18:45:53 -0400, "Woodrick, Ed" > So I guess if you want to get down to nitpicking, if the callsign is not > in the field then you need to make sure to switch your radio to FM and > identify appropriately. Actually the opposite is true... Recent FCC cases have affirmed that, for example, digital HF voice needs to remain in the VOICE portion of the band... they consider it voice, even though it's clearly a digital mode. They've been slowly making this move for a while now. I found it kinda funny... if I were to say take an mp3 file with musical content, and send that over to a friend via Packet, D-STAR, whatever... what's heard on the air isn't "music" by any means, but if you go by their view on HF digital voice, you would have to say that was an illegal music transmission. Then you go look at HF digital data, and see Pactor III an unpublished, non-reproducible format, but "loved" by Emergency Services volunteers for its ability to jam a frequency without listening for other modes/traffic... er, I mean... "get the messages through"... (sorry, my brainwashing isn't quite finished yet)... But that's okay to the FCC. The ONLY way to copy it is to own a $1000 product, that's not based on a published, reproducible specification... unlike D-STAR, I might add. Even that's been broken though really... I don't think the DD module setup by default blocks port 443 or does any inspection to see if a payload is encrypted. I bet I can SSH from a laptop on an ID-1 to a machine halfway around the globe, making both my transmissions and the transmissions of the DD module, illegal here in the States. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
