On Mar 15, 11:38�pm, John Smith I wrote:
wrote:

"The market" spoke very clearly, in the form of comments
to FCC. The CTT proposal was overwhelmingly
opposed. About 7 out of 8 comments on it clearly said NO.
Sounds like a clear message from the market to me!

73 de Jim, N2EY

However, if a new market comes forth, one composed of amateurs with
little or no knowledge of CW and only using digital voice and digital
data transmission--it would be market controlled also, and one would
suspect it would self-correct and frown on the use of the bands for
wasteful analog and cw communications.

If a new market appears, use of various modes will change,
and the new market can propose rules changes to FCC.

If a new market really does emerge, such proposal will
be widely supported in the comments.

However, it seems to me that the "new market" may be
more of an illusion than a reality. We've had PCs in
hamshacks for a couple decades now, and yet the
popularity of analog modes doesn't seem to be declining.

I recall being told, 20+ years ago, that there would soon
be a national highspeed digital amateur radio packet
network using VHF and UHF that would turn HF into a
backup system. Never happened.

As for "wasteful analog and cw communications" - why do
you call them wasteful?

Can a real-time digital voice message be sent in the
width of an SSB voice signal and result in the same
effectiveness? (signal to noise, power requirements, lack of need to
synchronize, tolerance of interference and fading, etc.)?

Is there any non-text data mode (IOW, something you listen to rather
than look at) which can replace Morse Code?

Should AM voice be banned from amateur radio? How
about FM voice?

Let's face it, digital voice is the only way to go.

Why? And which kind of digital voice?

Why can't there be a choice of modes - digital, analog,
old, new - available to hams?

*PSK is too slow for
data transmission of LARGE and multi-megabyte amounts of data, end of story.

Not the end of the story at all.

Yes, PSK31 is too slow for large amounts of data - because
it wasn't designed for that. PSK31 was designed to be a
keyboard-to-keyboard mode that uses very little bandwidth and has
excellent performance with low S/N ratios. It was
meant as an improvement to FSK RTTY for such QSOs.

For real-time (live) QSOs, PSK31 is fast enough.

An "industry standard" for encryption/compaction and
decryption/de-compaction still needs to come forth to deal with HIGH
transfer rates of digital voice and data transmission and availability
to ALL hardware/software developers/manufacturers be assured to such a
standard(s) ...

Yup. And that's the "who's going to tie the bell on the cat" question.
Who will come up with that standard?

That's the key question to the whole issue. Who is going to
do all that development work and then give it away free?
G3PLX and a small group did it for PSK31.

Great care needs to exercised when proposing and developing acceptable
schemes to the above, we certainly don't need to create a "tower of
babel" by not having free access to algorithms and standard methods in
common use--and free use and experimentation needs to be right up front
and encouraged--this only holds with the tradition of amateur radio!

Agreed! And it's already been established as a tradition.
PSK-31 is a classic example. Everything about it is wide
open and free-for-the-download.

OTOH, Pactor 2/3 is not free at all.
Implementing it requires buying a
specific hardware modem that is rather pricey. Some may
say that $600 for a modem isn't much in the scheme of
things, but even if that's true, it's the principle of proprietary
methods that goes against the grain.

btw, there is a downside to all this digital stuff. With
'analog' modes, such as AM, FM, SSB and Morse Code,
anyone with a suitable receiver can hear amateur
communications as they were meant to be heard. Tuning
in SSB requires a specialized technique, and *understanding* Morse
Code requires learning a skill or
using a decoder, but all that is needed to receive them
is a suitable receiver. IOW, they're wide open.

With digital modes, the incoming message is incomprehensible without a
decoding device - usually
a computer. That creates a divide between those who
are equipped and those who aren't.

Some may think this is trivial in a world where computers
are all over the place. And perhaps it is. But it may not
be a trivial thing at all. In the days when AM voice was
*the* voice mode used by hams on HF, amateur radio
got a lot of new hams from folks who heard hams talking
on their 'shortwave' receivers. That source all but
disappeared when SSB replaced AM, because most
SWLs couldn't receive SSB. More recently, we've gotten
new hams from the ranks of the scanner folks, because
they could hear amateur FM repeaters.

Going digital would eliminate most of that.

IOW, watch out for the Law of Unintentional Consequences.

73 de Jim, N2EY