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:

1. Use SSE to encrypt text (both the sender and receipient need to share a password over a secure channel beforehand)
2. Copy-Paste the Ciphertext that SSE spits out into Rattlegram (Rattlegram will convert the ciphertext into an audio)
3. Play the audio over the radio
4. On the other end, use Rattlegram to turn the audio back to the ciphertext
5. 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 portable ones won’t work. These 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 buildings, so you are gonna need to use a repeater that’s been set up by someone (unless you manage to find an a tall building that permits you to mount antennas and install a ham repeater by your self). 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 yourselv a communication system more secure than pigeons.