Leo wrote in message . ..

I understand that Morse is good for getting through poor conditions
better than voice.

Much better than any form of analog voice.

Makes sense, it is narrowband and binary (well,
tri-state if you count the spaces...) encoded.

Exactly.

From the experimenting
(read: fooling around) that I have been doing over the past couple of
months, I have been repeatedly amazed with the ability of BPSK-31 to
get clean copy through pretty bad conditions. Even DX signals that
appear as weak vestiges on the waterfall display can be easily decoded
with near 100% accuracy, using just a PC sound card as an interface.

The soundcard is only part of the system. The decoder is quite smart,
in that
it stores and examines the received data and does a "best fit"
decoder. You can read all about it at several websites.

But it's important to realize what constitutes "poor conditions".
Against purely amplitude noise it's quite robust. But against phase
noise of various
types it is not robust at all. All depends on the situation.

Frequency stability of my old Heath TX is a problem, but I'm working
on it.....

What rig is it?

Now there's something that will get through when nothing else will.

Not really. You will find times when the PSK-31 signal is clearly
audible in the speaker, well above the background amplitude noise, but
the decoder cannot make sense of it because the phase distortion is
too bad.

And, it types itself out, too. (that's a real boon for the perennially
lazy - like me)

It was meant as a replacement for conventional RTTY - as a "keyboard
to keyboard" mode. For example, the speed was chosen to be about what
*average* conversational keyboarding hams use.

btw, the code used in PSK-31 uses shorter symbols for the most common
characters and longer ones for the least common. Just like Morse code,
which is where the designers got the idea.

I believe that BPSK-31 was created within the amateur community -

Yup - G3PLX, and a number of folks who helped him by testing it out on
the air and others who have developed software packages. A local ham
of my acquaintance (one of those longtime 20 wpm 1x2 Extras with
multiple EE degrees - we share two alma maters, btw) was one of the
team who helped test it out.

PSK-31 is another great tool in the toolbox, but not a replacement for
good old Morse Code.

73 de Jim, N2EY