J. Mc Laughlin wrote:
Dear Joel Koltner (no call sign):
I know of no site where the classic paper may be downloaded. The paper
had a significant influence on how people thought about modulation and
frequency allocation. "Shannon, Poison (I can not think how to spell his
name) and the Radio Amateur" is the title of the paper.
Actually, the title is "Poisson, Shannon, and the Radio Amateur",
Proceedings of the IRE, Dec 1959, Vol 47, Issue 12, pages 2058-2068. The
abstract is:
Congested band operation as found in the amateur service presents an
interesting problem in analysis which can only be solved by statistical
methods. Consideration is given to the relative merits of two currently
popular modulation techniques, SSB and DSB. It is found that in spite of
the bandwidth economy of SSB this system can claim no over-all advantage
with respect to DSB for this service. It is further shown that there are
definite advantages to the use of very broadband techniques in the
amateur service. The results obtained from the analysis of the radio
amateur service are significant, for they challenge the intuitively
obvious and universally accepted thesis that congestion in the radio
frequency spectrum can only be relieved by the use of progressively
smaller transmission bandwidths obtained by appropriate coding and
modulation techniques. In order to study the general problem of spectrum
utilization, some basic results of information theory are required. Some
of the significant work of Shannon is reviewed with special emphasis on
his channel capacity formula. It is shown that this famous formula, in
spite of its deep philosophical significance, cannot be used
meaningfully in the analysis and design of practical, present day
communications systems. A more suitable channel capacity formula is
derived for the practical case. The analytical results thus obtained are
used to show that broadband techniques have definite merit for both
civil and military applications.
Phil Karn (KA9Q) had some comments:
http://www.ka9q.net/vmsk/shannon.html