Michael Coslo wrote:
wrote:
Michael Coslo wrote:
snip
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?
Of course, the repeater is supposed to have an active control
OP.
True, but all that really means is that there needs to be somebody who
can shut the repeater down in case of trouble.
If a repeater is operating normally and the hams using it
follow the rules, its operation can be completely
automatic.
The
frequencies are also agreed upon. IOW, anyone operating simplex on say
the portions of 2 meters designated as repeater frequencies
might expect
some problems. Sats are also pretty well defined too.
And that's the whole point - let there be a place for the robots, not a
ban on them.
The nature of PSK31 is to use what is essentially the BW
that 1 SSB
signal would use.
Not really. That's just current practice. It was driven in part by rigs
like the Warbler, and in part by the desire to avoid manually tuning
your rig.
We pack a lot of signals in that small space. Due to
the nature of the signal and modulation, we tend to congregate in just that one area.
I think the congregating is due more to the nature of the
hardware/software implementations.
The Warbler is/was the ultimate example of that implementation - no
tuning at all! It takes in a couple-of-kHz slice of the band
and lets the soundcard and audio do the heavy demodulation and
modulation. Makes for a simple but highly inflexible radio.
When the pactor station opens up beside us, we can't tell
each other to
QSY, we are done for the day. Turn off the rig,
or maybe change the band.
Or switch modes to tell the others the new QRG. Gee, what mode
could do that job......?
I suppose that we could agree on a predefined frequency
to change to in
the event of interference, since there is no way to
let the robot
station know that it is interfering with us.
Perhaps the robot's design should be such to detect what is going on..
But you raise a question - does the robot open up on top of the PSK31
watering hole, or adjacent to it?
But it seems to me that we are allowing unattended operation to
interfere with what is a popular, BW conserving mode, populated
by
Amateurs who are at least (moreso IMHO) as gentlemanly and
ladylike as
CW to be QRM'ed in the interest of getting the spam through.
Which is why coordination is needed. The robots need their place
and the PSKers *their* place.
You might be interested to research what used to go on around 3579
before PSK31 made that QRG popular for the mode...
Yeah - progress.....
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?
First, let me state my position:
I do not believe that one way transmissions
should be legal on the amateur bands.
Period.
As has been demonstrated in other posts, that's not a very
tenable position. Banning "one way" transmissions of all
types from amateur radio would seriously impede many
important aspects of the Amateur Radio Service, without
much in the way of benefits.
All of the "qualifications as to published schedules,
frequencies,
interests, and controls is bafflegab, designed to
justify the ARRL transmissions.
Not bafflegab at all, but rules designed to permit
important activities while still banning out-and-out
broadcasting.
There are people like K1MAN in the world, ready to
rub peoples noses in
the mud any chance they get. and this is a big fat chance here!
IIRC, 'MAN violated several of the above requirements. For example,
there were times when there was no control operator
apparent.
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?
Dunno. Nothing like pertectin killerwatt signals from QRP!
That's a situation which "regulation by bandwidth" can fix *if* it's
done with some sense!
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)
Now those are all things that can be worked on.
Only if the rules change.
Did you hear about the proposed PSK31 text/voice mode?
Not yet. As I understand the present rules, it's not allowed
on amateur HF in the USA. If you use it in the 'phone/image
subbands it's not allowed because of the text part, and if
you use it in the Morse Code/data subbands it's not allowed because of
the voice part.
It actually
would probably work better as BPSK64, but it is both
interesting and
goofy at the same time.
So what? I say, let those who are interested try it out!
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"....
hehe.
Which shows the real problem: Short-circuit between the head-phones.
The robot problem has nothing to do with one-way transmissions.
It's a completely different situation.
73 de Jim, N2EY