Dear Jim:

I am obliged to you for the title correction. My memory might not be
what it was. Thanks also for the abstract.
While the paper (again from memory and poked by the abstract) is written
in terms of SSB/DSB, a main issue is that of vector addition of copies of a
signal with noise and interference not being coherent. One ends up with a
system that is resistive to noise and interference up to a point where it
stops working.
73, Mac N8TT
--
J. McLaughlin; Michigan, USA
Home:
"Jim Lux" wrote in message
...
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