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

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.

--

Rick