For sporadic medium-long distance communication over packet radio. 10MHz isn’t too crowded and can be easily used for regional communications (and occasionally long distance) via atmospheric bounce. It also works well at low power and the antenna is shorter than other long distance modes like the longer wave HF bands (20m+).
Sending data by radio is messy, slow, and generally disappointing. Start your journey by reading up on the Aloha system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet.
They can route between models but you pay the standard rate for whichever model is selected (plus 5% fee). Afaik all current model providers have fixed prices per tokens which don't vary depending on, say, demand or hardware availability.
On one hand, injuries from vehicular accidents in the roadway may decline to AVs being generally safer. On the other, intentional violence due to unrest and unhappy jobless in "the streets" may limit or entirely offset those gains.
I can corroborate this finding -- I think the horn switch is just a logic-level digital switch going into one or more MCUs somewhere, subjected to all manner of latency and (probably) CANBUS jitter. It's not great. Trying to send Morse, or even a quick 'toot toot' results in a garbled mangled mess, and I find that very annoying. My early cars & motorbike had what felt like direct, switched control over power to the horn, those were great to use. I've debated installing a dedicated pushbutton rated for the amperage or at least controlling a solenoid somewhere that would power the horn.
As an experiment, I've found that you can reliably detect the presence of crummy horn control by trying to pulse the horn for the shortest amount of time possible. The shorter my push on the horn button gets, the more likely it is that the timing will feel wrong somehow, or the horn doesn't even sound at all.
I've definitely tried friendly beeps at friends or neighbors and it came out sounding like an angry honk.
I wonder about the battery SoC being reported with macpow; there are several different ways to calculate that metric and it's not clear which is being used. I may dig into that if I get the chance. Neat tool!
I can't find it immediately, but I've read about something even sneakier than this. A standard broadcast station was modified such that its carrier signal was modulated by a PSK signal. The intended listener would use e.g., a PSK-31 modem to listen to the carrier signal and would be able to obtain the encoded digital data. Everyday listeners would hear the regular broadcast. The station involved _might_ have been a BBC station, but I don't recall.
You could technically just transmit data via RDS, too. Change a letter here and there and nobody would know whether that’s a decoding error or actual ciphertext. (Would need some kind of checksum or so, of course.)
@windytan did a fascinating audio clip highlighting the RDS data stream in a radio recording some while ago:
I'm starting to believe this is [a] way forward. Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between <everything I have is on a phone behind a fingerprint and a four digit pin> and <I don't own a smartphone>.
Unfortunately, it's pretty common to only have a smartphone as your sole compute device, and increasingly onerous not to own one at all.
>Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between
>increasingly onerous not to own one at all.
Yes, and I think this unfortunately demands a grey area. I'm starting to treat my smartphone more like a work device, and there are a few things I do on it:
- My work's authenticator app is there.
- Unfortunately Signal is tied to smartphone usage.
- Practically speaking, people will expect to be able to send you text messages.
- It's still useful for taking pictures.
- My banking app is on there.
Outside of rare occasions, that's really all I use my phone for. I don't carry it around the house. If I go somewhere with my wife, I don't even bring my phone most of the time. I'm "required" to have it, but in principle it's not even mine. It shouldn't be trusted or enjoyed.
(edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment & observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You just got me thinking about how that situation might have been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)
> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]
I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?
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