I just had a nice QSO with Bo W8ISG today. We first linked on standard ALE but the propagation was rapidly decaying. Before we lost contact on ALE, I sent a simple ALE AMD text message "GO TO OLIVIA". We changed to Olivia 1000/32 and made good contact, but eventually, that dropped to about 75% print when the QSB made the signal impossible to hear. We then changed to Olivia 250/8. All of a sudden we had better than 90% print, and continued with a very nice (but slow) QSO... texting for a long time, without being able to hear each other.
That's the first experience I've had comparing Olivia 250/8 with 1000/32 on 20 meters in near-threshold conditions. I am very impressed with 250/8 performance. Bonnie KQ6XA
