Michael Coslo wrote:
wrote:
snip
There's a fundamental divide appearing in radio modes nowadays.
Modes like Morse Code and the analog voice modes
are real time, "direct
experience" modes. A human listens to the
demodulated signal directly, in real time.
The "digital" modes are fundamentally different
in that there is
decoding beyond the demodulation process. A
machine does the decoding -
the human does not 'listen' to the signal
at all in most cases.
Which is great for people such as myself!
Agreed! One more tool in the toolbox.
Look at PSK31 - you see a particular pattern on the
waterfall, click on
it, and the decoded text appears. If there is
interference, the text is
garbled, and there's not very much you can do
about it. And what you
can do is a matter of equipment adjustment,
not skill in listening.
Thank goodness for that! If listening skill
was the main criteria, I
wouldn't be much of a Ham! Well hearing skills maybe.....
Actually, Mike, your *listening* skills are probably excellent.
Because of this difference, it makes sense to allow
certain modes -
like Morse Code - a place free of interference
from "machine modes",
just like the trails where motor vehicles are not allowed.
I'm certainly all for keeping those accursed robot
stations in their
own section of the bands (actually, I am not in
favor of their existance
- I think they violate the spirit if not the law).
Repeaters, satellites and beacons are robots of a sort.
Should we ban those too?
How is a robot
station that wipes out sometimes dozens of QSO's any different from
certain Amateurs who have been known to broadcast "bulletins
right over top of ongoing QSOs?
Several important measures:
1) Does the bulletin station operate on a published schedule of
times and frequencies?
2) Does the bulletin station transmit only information of
clear and special interest to radio amateurs? (IOW, not general
news and such?)
3) Is the bulletin station using an approved method of control?
Voice modes like SSB and AM are protected from modes like
PSK31 and
RTTY. The spectrum allowed to those modes in the US HF ham
bands
amounts to more than half the total spectrum available! If
such
protection is good enough for SSB and AM, why not Morse Code?
I have to smile at the concept of SSB and AM being
protected from my wimpy little PSK31 signal.
But they are! You can legally transmit PSK31 anywhere on the HF ham
bands where voice modes are *not* allowed. Why does SSB need
protection from PSK31 but not Morse Code?
This sort of thing has some odd ramifiactions. Imagine if you wanted to
use a combined text/voice mode. Such a mode might
use SSB *with carrier* for the voice part, with the carrier
phase-shifted to send the text. Such a mode is not allowed
on amateur HF.
One can even imagine a mode consisting of SSB on one sideband,
SSTV-type images (digitally encoded) on the other, and text
on the phase-shifted carrier. Something neat to try out, huh?
Except it's not allowed on the amateur HF bands either.
Butfull-carrier double-sideband AM voice is allowed.
In both cases the prohibition is not due to the bandwidth used
but because of the content (voice/image vs. text)
I understand your analogy, but I don't think it quite hits the
fundamental divide point. Certainly RTTY and SSTV and ATV
and HELL mode
have been around for quite a while.
Sure - but they've been of limited use until recently because of
the difficulty of implementation. With the drastic reduction
in the cost of a computer, the increased computing power, and
the wide selection of easy-to-use freeware, the game is very
different than even 10 years ago.
Of course none of this prevents someone from having "happy fingers"....
73 de Jim, N2EY