Mike Coslo wrote:
an old friend wrote:
Dave Heil wrote:
Mike Coslo wrote:
Dave Heil wrote:

You purport to be an active radio amateur
and you didn't even have a
realistic idea of how many hams there
are in the United States? Do
you think the FCC and ARRL are in
collusion and they've whipped up
some massive coverup of the number
of licensees? Sheesh!

We know pretty closely how many individuals there are with
current (unexpired) FCC-issued amateur radio licenses - about
664,000

What we don't know is how many of those ~664,000 fall into
the following categories:

- Inactive due to being dead
- Inactive due to being seriously sick or injured
- Inactive due to loss of interest
- Inactive due to lack of resources (time, money, space, etc.)
- Slightly active
- Moderately active
- Very active

Worse, the definitions of the last three categories are entirely
subjective. If a ham is on the air 100 hours per year, is that
ham slightly, moderately, or very active?

This approach has been in evidence early on.
Facts are of secondary importance to opinion.

To some folks, their opinions *are* facts.

If we are told that there are not the
number of hams claimed on the
database, then that is the truth. If
that means that the FCC is lying,
that is the truth.

No, it's just somebody's opinion.

If we are told that the only thing needed
to go digital on HF is to
hook up that 56K modem to the rig, then that is the truth.

Actually, you *can* hook up a 56K modem to your HF rig and
"go digital". Doesn't mean it will work....

Note that almost all dialup modems have the ability to
operate at less than 56K. Backwards compatibility and
all that. Some will go all the way back to 300 baud.

If we are told that Ham radio is dying, then that is true.

Ham radio has always been "dying" - and always being reborn.

I was around back in 1968 when some folks said that 'incentive
licensing' would 'kill amateur radio'. Those folks said it was
completely unreasonable to expect or even ask the average ham
to get an Advanced, let alone an Extra.

Yet in the decade after those new requirements were put in place, the
number of US hams grew from about 250,000 to about 350,000.
And that was before the VE system and published question pools.

Sure, some of that was helped by the Bash books, but there were
no Bash books for 20 wpm Morse Code.

You can't argue with someone who makes up the
facts as they go along, so why do it?

Exactly!

It is tough to beat an anonymous man with
invisible sources for
invisible facts.

Yup. Like folks who claim that 57% is not a majority...

BTW, CQ has an article on HF digital
transmission. Seems that they have
got it all wrong too. They have a method
that works, but it is pretty
slow for images (or files) of any appreciable size.

So send small files!

HF will never be the place for high speed
digital transmission. There
is too much noise and signals are subject
to the vagaries of wave
propagation phenomena.

A lot depends on what you mean by "high speed", and what
resources you can use.

For example, if you're allowed to use wide-enough bandwidths,
all sorts of stuff is possible.

If you're allowed to use very high power and high gain antennas,
all sorts of stuff is possible.

If you can separate the transmit and receive sites and/or frequencies
so that full duplex is achieved, all sorts of
things are possible.

If your setup has adaptive features so that it evaluates
the path characteristics and adapts the modulation and
frequencies used to conditions, all sorts of things are
possible.

Of course most of the above is simply not practical for
the average ham, and/or is incompatible with current US
regulations.

really? gee it falls into the same catagory as
when it was said that we
ham had been banished to "useless frequencies"
everything above 200M

Hams were never banished to everything above 200 meters.

What happened was that amateur stations were required to use
only wavelengths of 200 meters and below. But every station had
a specified wavelength. If a ham wanted to use, say, 159 meters,
s/he needed a station license that said "159 meters".

In 1912 there wasn't much known about how HF propagation actually
worked. The 'useless' idea came from extrapolation of what happened on
longer wavelengths. The ionosphere's role was not
even guessed at by "professionals in radio".

There are some pretty darn good reasons why high-speed digital
HF won't
work well. And they aren't related to early "knowledge" that
caused hams
to be relegated to those higher frequencies at the time.

Radio is a fairly mature field, and digital is getting there.
Many
people have a pretty good idea what will likely work, based on education
and experience. And HF is an unruly beast, given to noisy and incredibly
variable conditions. We don't have to be rocket scientists to gain that
knowledge.

Just as an exercise, how much information can be carried by a 1.8 MHz
signal? How much error correction will be needed during the summer, and
how much during the winter? Why is there a difference? Why would a
wireless digital transmission system use UHF and above for data
transmission?

All very good questions!

when was that Jim

A long, long time ago. When almost nothing was known about propagation.

Jim might note that they do some bandwidth tricks in similar manner
as he proposed per our conversation in here earlier. Not exact, but
along the same lines
Hopefully we will see an article from those who know the right way
to HF digital soon. 8^)

I don't have my CQ handy, but it took them a fair amount of time
(measured in minutes IIRC, to transmit some heavily compressed (beyond
maximum jpeg compression), and therefore really poor quality (by almost
everyones standard) pictures.

Didn't I make a challenge with some of the HF high-speed digital
believers in here to do a sked? I think the "answer" was that I was
going to steal the technology.

You can't steal vaporware.

Not that that is likely, but how about say some of the
believers among
themselves, do a proof of performance of the technology?

Or is this just one of those Wondertenna type ideas that crop
up from
time to time, only to be found lacking when introduced
into the real world?

Heck, Mike, you want *practical* stuff?

73 de Jim, N2EY