| Home |
| Search |
| Today's Posts |
|
#11
August 29th 05, 09:32 PM
|
|||
|
|||
Michael Coslo wrote: wrote: Michael Coslo wrote: snip I'm certainly all for keeping those accursed robot stations in their own section of the bands (actually, I am not in favor of their existance - I think they violate the spirit if not the law). Repeaters, satellites and beacons are robots of a sort. Should we ban those too? Of course, the repeater is supposed to have an active control OP. True, but all that really means is that there needs to be somebody who can shut the repeater down in case of trouble. If a repeater is operating normally and the hams using it follow the rules, its operation can be completely automatic. The frequencies are also agreed upon. IOW, anyone operating simplex on say the portions of 2 meters designated as repeater frequencies might expect some problems. Sats are also pretty well defined too. And that's the whole point - let there be a place for the robots, not a ban on them. The nature of PSK31 is to use what is essentially the BW that 1 SSB signal would use. Not really. That's just current practice. It was driven in part by rigs like the Warbler, and in part by the desire to avoid manually tuning your rig. We pack a lot of signals in that small space. Due to the nature of the signal and modulation, we tend to congregate in just that one area. I think the congregating is due more to the nature of the hardware/software implementations. The Warbler is/was the ultimate example of that implementation - no tuning at all! It takes in a couple-of-kHz slice of the band and lets the soundcard and audio do the heavy demodulation and modulation. Makes for a simple but highly inflexible radio. When the pactor station opens up beside us, we can't tell each other to QSY, we are done for the day. Turn off the rig, or maybe change the band. Or switch modes to tell the others the new QRG. Gee, what mode could do that job......? I suppose that we could agree on a predefined frequency to change to in the event of interference, since there is no way to let the robot station know that it is interfering with us. Perhaps the robot's design should be such to detect what is going on.. But you raise a question - does the robot open up on top of the PSK31 watering hole, or adjacent to it? But it seems to me that we are allowing unattended operation to interfere with what is a popular, BW conserving mode, populated by Amateurs who are at least (moreso IMHO) as gentlemanly and ladylike as CW to be QRM'ed in the interest of getting the spam through. Which is why coordination is needed. The robots need their place and the PSKers *their* place. You might be interested to research what used to go on around 3579 before PSK31 made that QRG popular for the mode... Yeah - progress..... How is a robot station that wipes out sometimes dozens of QSO's any different from certain Amateurs who have been known to broadcast "bulletins right over top of ongoing QSOs? Several important measures: 1) Does the bulletin station operate on a published schedule of times and frequencies? 2) Does the bulletin station transmit only information of clear and special interest to radio amateurs? (IOW, not general news and such?) 3) Is the bulletin station using an approved method of control? First, let me state my position: I do not believe that one way transmissions should be legal on the amateur bands. Period. As has been demonstrated in other posts, that's not a very tenable position. Banning "one way" transmissions of all types from amateur radio would seriously impede many important aspects of the Amateur Radio Service, without much in the way of benefits. All of the "qualifications as to published schedules, frequencies, interests, and controls is bafflegab, designed to justify the ARRL transmissions. Not bafflegab at all, but rules designed to permit important activities while still banning out-and-out broadcasting. There are people like K1MAN in the world, ready to rub peoples noses in the mud any chance they get. and this is a big fat chance here! IIRC, 'MAN violated several of the above requirements. For example, there were times when there was no control operator apparent. Voice modes like SSB and AM are protected from modes like PSK31 and RTTY. The spectrum allowed to those modes in the US HF ham bands amounts to more than half the total spectrum available! If such protection is good enough for SSB and AM, why not Morse Code? I have to smile at the concept of SSB and AM being protected from my wimpy little PSK31 signal. But they are! You can legally transmit PSK31 anywhere on the HF ham bands where voice modes are *not* allowed. Why does SSB need protection from PSK31 but not Morse Code? Dunno. Nothing like pertectin killerwatt signals from QRP! That's a situation which "regulation by bandwidth" can fix *if* it's done with some sense! This sort of thing has some odd ramifiactions. Imagine if you wanted to use a combined text/voice mode. Such a mode might use SSB *with carrier* for the voice part, with the carrier phase-shifted to send the text. Such a mode is not allowed on amateur HF. One can even imagine a mode consisting of SSB on one sideband, SSTV-type images (digitally encoded) on the other, and text on the phase-shifted carrier. Something neat to try out, huh? Except it's not allowed on the amateur HF bands either. Butfull-carrier double-sideband AM voice is allowed. In both cases the prohibition is not due to the bandwidth used but because of the content (voice/image vs. text) Now those are all things that can be worked on. Only if the rules change. Did you hear about the proposed PSK31 text/voice mode? Not yet. As I understand the present rules, it's not allowed on amateur HF in the USA. If you use it in the 'phone/image subbands it's not allowed because of the text part, and if you use it in the Morse Code/data subbands it's not allowed because of the voice part. It actually would probably work better as BPSK64, but it is both interesting and goofy at the same time. So what? I say, let those who are interested try it out! I understand your analogy, but I don't think it quite hits the fundamental divide point. Certainly RTTY and SSTV and ATV and HELL mode have been around for quite a while. Sure - but they've been of limited use until recently because of the difficulty of implementation. With the drastic reduction in the cost of a computer, the increased computing power, and the wide selection of easy-to-use freeware, the game is very different than even 10 years ago. Of course none of this prevents someone from having "happy fingers".... hehe. Which shows the real problem: Short-circuit between the head-phones. The robot problem has nothing to do with one-way transmissions. It's a completely different situation. 73 de Jim, N2EY |
| Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
| Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads
|
||||
| Thread | Forum | |||
| Seeking comments from Icom PCR1000 Users | Scanner | |||
| Seeking Comments from Icom PCR1000 Users | Shortwave | |||
| Citizens make inappropriate comments? | Policy | |||
| NASWA Draft BPL Comments | Shortwave | |||
| BPL interference - reply comments - YOUR ACTION REQUIRED | Policy | |||
Threaded Mode
