Should have guessed!

Henrique Bucher writes a substack on computer coding as used by stock traders. I’ve enjoyed reading it for the nerdy pleasures of machine language and compilers. His latest piece covers an entirely different technology, shortwave.

I’ve talked repeatedly about the ‘sporting’ nature of shortwave, and the vacancy of the spectrum since SW broadcasters mostly surrendered to the web. I’ve been wondering if some clandestine groups might take advantage of the ‘sport’.

Ionospheric skip, when it works, allows you to communicate between two distant areas with no interception between the areas. Skip is always chancy. Hams turned the chance into a sport, trying to achieve maximum distance with minimum power. I should have guessed that stock traders would grab such an opportunity. They’re always looking for ways to communicate without interception, ways to frontrun the competition. Every new tech** is grabbed FIRST by frontrunners and bettors, from Chappe’s semaphores to electrical telegraphs to Compuserve to the HTML web.

Bucher cites a number of presentations made to FCC by trading companies trying to gain legitimacy.

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** I’m specifically excluding bitcoin from this category. It has been absorbed by Larry Fink, along with the rest of the world, but it was NOT invented as a legitimate tech like semaphores or shortwave. Bitcoin was developed BY the bankers FOR the bankers, and has always been used by the bankers to enrich the rich and kill the poor, like everything else in the world. Fink’s absorption is just the intended endgame, in typical LBO form.