I don’t know anything about it, so hopefully someone else has more experience, but I found this, so I assume the answer is yes.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Great, this is much cheaper than my original plan of laying 9 kilometers of copper wire. Thanks!
Referring to the death of a pigeon as "packet loss" feels like some weird form of low-tech cyberpunk.
Carrier pigeons make an excellent bandwidth benchmark though.
Sneaker networks (flash drives stores in sneakers) are still some of the highest bandwidth out there.
To this day, nothing beats a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
The bandwidth of a station wagon just keeps increasing with advances in storage technology.
But a 10Gb/s line will do about 100TB in a day, so there's not that many situations left where you have enough data to make the station wagon worth the effort. Wikipedia has a few examples, with the most recent being a truck doing 100PB for AWS. I think we passed station wagon station 10 years ago.
Latency is abysmal though
Are you looking for "Off Grid" secure communications?
Well I got a solution:
There are two apps you need to know:
Rattlegram is an app on iOS/Android that alllows converting a string of text to audio and play it over your phone’s speaker
Secure Space Encryptor (SSE) (known as Paranoia Text Encryption on iOS) is an Open Source app that can encrypt text, turning any string of plain text into ciphertext
So you want secure communications, all that you (and the people you want to communicate with) need is a smartphone with these apps installed, and a ham radio. (Or if you want to test it all by yourself, you'll need two radios, two smartphones with Rattlegram installed)
Procedure:
- Use SSE to encrypt text (both the sender and receipient need to share a password over a secure channel beforehand)
- Copy-Paste the Ciphertext that SSE spits out into Rattlegram (Rattlegram will convert the ciphertext into an audio)
- Play the audio over the radio
- On the other end, use Rattlegram to turn the audio back to the ciphertext
- Use SSE to decrypt.
Or replace SSE with OpenPGP, but the problem with PGP messages, is that they are much longer and you need to send multiple Rattlegram transmissions to send the entire ciphertext, basically its more time consuming. You want to finish your transmissions as soon as possible.
Voila! Off-Grid Encrypted communications.
(Encryption is illegal over Ham Radio in many jurisdictions. I will neither confirm nor deny that I have tested sending an encrypted transmission 😉
Ususally, most governments will not care unless you started to use it for insurrection or something like that.)
There are small ham radios you can carry with you, there are ones that are suppose to stay in one location (think like a desktop PC, you don't tyoically carry them around).
So to acheive the 9km range, you'll need to have both radios be very powerful, so the cheap portable ones won't work. These powerful ones are probably like several hundred dollars, and you'll probably need to put an antenna on your roof. If you live in the city, there's gonna be alot of interference from tall buildings, so you are gonna need to use a repeater that's been set up by someone in somewhere high up (unless you manage to find an a tall building that permits you to mount antennas and install a ham repeater by your self). Also: HF radio wavelengths will travel further than VHF /UHF.
So yea, just find a way to get the signal through, or live in a rural area where there's no interference, and you have yourself a communication system more secure than pigeons.
Encryption is illegal over Ham Radio in many jurisdictions.
To be clear, encryption is not illegal per se. Obscuring the meaning of a message is what’s illegal. You can encrypt radio traffic if you have the keys posted somewhere so that anybody could decrypt the transmission. If you obscure the meaning of a message in plain English by using code words, that’s illegal.
I am in a rural area, so this would work. Although, I could just pgp encrypt a message and put it on a microsd card, and send that with a pigeon.
Hmm..
Can any of this be weaponized to protect a property?
Can any wireless be..? Ideally without frying anything locally like an EMP.. “you mean an emp? No, and EMP!”
Here in the Netherlands the “pigeon racing” sport is still relatively alive, but does have an aging target group. Pigeons are driven somewhere many miles anyway, (well km’s) and released, first home gets a price.
There are breeders and trainers etc.
if you’re really interested in pigeon behavior Rowan university in New Jersey has a pigeon lab for studying avian communication and cognition
Well, I'm in Ireland, but thanks anyway!
So you definitely can’t go there easily but Gerald Hough is who does a lot of research on the abilities of homing pigeons and is available via email if you had specific questions
https://csm.rowan.edu/departments/psychology/research/aviancognition.html
Is his bio and email
Send him a pigeon, duh!
So yes, they are still possible to train and use, are in active use (for example in photography for rafting), and there are RFC standards relating to internet over carrier pigeon. Also, they are actually favourable compared with ADSL so yeah, a legitimate possible option for some cases.
There's a homing pigeon club not far from where I live.
I once went down a rabbit hole looking at falconry. In my state its heavy regulated, it's probably the same with pigeons.
I don't think that's correct. Most raptors are, I believe, regulated due to their conservation status. E.g., AFAIK, the only people that can legally kill raptors are people that belong to certain Native American tribes; simple possession of things like hawk feathers that you picked up from roadkill can be a felony.
Pigeons in general aren't really at any kind of conservation risk
I don't doubt you're right nobody cares about the lowly pigeon, in fact some cities encourage nesting of raptors to keep their population in check. I do doubt any protected birds are allowed to be kept. Hawks are very common where I live, seeing a red tail or cooper's hawk is a daily occurance where I live so I assume the regulations are for humane treatment rather than preservation. My friend and his son came across a dead bald eagle while hiking and they kept it as they had a large skull collection. I looked it up and as you said it's against the law with very steep penalties so I advised him to make sure his son kept his mouth shut in school.
Since you've been obsessed with them lately, have you seen Who Is Cletis Tout? Great film that features some carrier pigeon action and an unconventional cast.
happy cake day, ill take a look at it. Thanks!
I was walking in the neighborhood recently and passed a guy putting a pigeon in a high up box in his yard. It was such a an odd thing that I wasn't sure what was going on, and mentioned to my daughter that I thought this guy was keeping pigeons, and she said "because you saw him KEEPING PIGEONS?" Which I guess is fair, it just was so weird I wasn't sure!
I don't know if he uses them to send messages, but some people certainly have them at least as pets.