"Michael Black" wrote in message
...

I haven't seen the new book, but I can't quite imagine that buying it
would negate the old one completely. I have a selection of handbooks
going back 40 years, and even the incremental changes between years when
I did buy them every year (much of the seventies) is enough for me
to keep them. I don't think much of the 1979 edition, but it has
the chapter on NBVM, "Narrow Band Voice Modulation", that made such
a splash that year and then completely faded out, with no later mention
of it.

There's some history behind NBVM. I guess it must have been in 1978, but
whenever, then-ARRL General Manager Dick Baldwin, W1RU, wrote an editorial
for QST with the theme of "We need a technical breakthrough," like the ones
hams were famous for in the past. Weeks later, NBVM popped up out of the
noise, and Baldwin ordered an article about it published in QST, with a
cover photo to match. AFAIK, no one else at Hq had ever heard of NBVM or the
inventors, and I wouldn't say the idea caught fire among the staff. But
there it was. The hardware was commercially produced by a publicly-held
company, but I never saw evidence that anyone officially connected with ARRL
owned any. If they did, it was their loss.

At that time, ARRL, as Headquarters society of the IARU, was preparing for a
World Administrative Radio Conference (WARC). This was one of the big WARCs
and there was some concern that we would lose HF spectrum. The official
story, of course, is that we gained the WARC bands, but in terms of net
spectrum it was a loss, due to incursions on the microwave bands. My
recollection is that we took a major whack on 13 cm, and also on several
other uw bands.

So that's the backscatter on NBVM.

73,

"PM"