"Jerry" writes:
this time, and that's WL2K. I don't intend to stand idly by and give up 40%
of our most popular bands so some rich dudes in their motor homes, or on
sailboats, can enjoy cheating the legitimate ISP's out of the fees that they
charge for providing this service.

Why stop there? Why not ban ham radio altogether, since (for example)
ham voice communication cheats all those poor starving phone companies?

Ponder this ... if these new wideband modes are soooo efficient, then why do
they require 20 Khz of space? If you give packet radio 20 Khz, it too could
be much faster. The speed limit on packet radio is now determined by the
pitiful amount of bandwidth allocated to them.

I'm all in favor of more bandwidth for spread spectrum packet, since
it means less likelihood of interference (a voice or CW conversation
could happen right on top of a 20 khz packet session without either
interfering with the other). But I agree ham radio should not be a
general purpose internet gateway.

One reasonable solution could be to limit the maximum bit rate on HF
to RTTY speed, 60 bits/sec or so, while still allowing spreading the
60 bits/sec across 20 khz of bandwidth. That's fast enough to send
reasonable email and to have realtime text chat, would not require any
tuning, and would be very effective at low transmit power. I've
been interested in this approach for quite a while.

Why does WL2K, a proprietary mode, with very high startup costs
deserve all of this spectrum when packet radio has had to deal with
the microscopic slices of bandwidth for all of these years???

I'm not familiar with WL2K but I don't like the idea of any type of
proprietary mode being given special recognition in the band plan
for any reason.