View Single Post
  #22   Report Post  
Old February 24th 15, 11:37 PM posted to uk.radio.amateur,rec.radio.amateur.equipment
Jerry Stuckle Jerry Stuckle is offline
external usenet poster
 
First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Oct 2012
Posts: 1,067
Default What is the point of digital voice?

On 2/24/2015 5:47 PM, rickman wrote:
On 2/24/2015 12:00 PM, Jerry Stuckle wrote:
On 2/24/2015 11:32 AM, FranK Turner-Smith G3VKI wrote:
"AndyW" wrote in message
...
On 24/02/2015 12:47, gareth wrote:
What is the point of digital voice when there are already AM, SSB
and FM for those who want to appear indistinguishable from CBers?

Perhaps it is cynicism from the manufacturers who introduce such
things
as they see their traditional highly-priced corner of the market
being wiped away by SDR technologies?

Bandwidth reduction for one.
If you can encode and compress speech sufficiently then you can use
less bandwidth in transmission.

That's the bit I have trouble getting my head around. Back in the 1970s
and 1980s digital transmissions used a much greater bandwidth than their
analogue equivalents. Sampling at 2.2 x max frequency x number of bits
plus housekeeping bits etc. etc.
A UK standard 625 line PAL video transmission would have used a
bandwidth of over 400MHz!
Times have changed and left me behind, but I've still got me beer so who
cares?


But you forget compression. For instance, unless there is a scene
change, the vast majority of a television picture does not change from
frame to frame. Even if the camera moves, the picture shifts but
doesn't change all that much. Why waste all of that bandwidth resending
information the receiver already has?

And voice isn't continuous; it has lots of pauses. Some are very
noticeable, while others are so short we don't consciously hear them,
but they are there.

And once you've compressed everything you can out of the original
signal, you can do bit compression, similar to zipping a file for
sending.

There are lots of ways to compress a signal before sending it digitally.
About the only one which can't be compressed is pure white noise -
which, of course, is only a concept (nothing is "pure").


I think that depends on what you mean by "pure". Sounds very
non-technical to me. Even noise can be compressed since if it is truly
noise, you don't need to send the data, just send the one bit that says
there is no signal, just noise. lol


Pure white noise is a random distribution of signal across the entire
spectrum, with an equal distribution of frequencies over time. Like a
pure resistor or capacitor, it doesn't exist. But the noise IS the
signal. To recreate the noise, you have to sample the signal and
transmit it. However, since it is completely random, by definition no
compression is possible.

A friend worked in sonar where the data was collected on ships and
transmitted via satellite to shore for signal processing rather than
doing any compression on the data and sending the useful info. As the
signal was nearly all "noise" trying to do any compression on it, even
the aspects that weren't "pure" white noise, would potentially have
masked the signals. Sonar is all about pulling the signal out of the
noise.


You mean the signal can't be compressed? No way. Any non-random signal
can be compressed to some extent. How much depends on the signal and
the amount of processing power required to compress it. However, in
your example, the processing power to compress the signal would probably
have been greater than that required to process the original signal. So
if there wasn't enough power to process the signal on the ship, there
wouldn't be enough power to compress the near-white noise signal, either.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry, AI0K

==================