I was thinking about the whole conundrum of PactorIII the other day, well after getting clobbered by a PT III MB coming up in the middle of my QSO on 40 meters, I started to think about it, and thought you know what I need, I need a tool that lets me decode Pactor III transmissions. Let me look at who the operator of the Pactor III MBO is, and what the traffic is that is so important that one of those *()*&(*&*( machines can come up in the middle of an on going QSO, and what sort of very important traffic was being passed.
Then I thought that I was too cheap to go out and buy a Pactor III modem just so I could play like I am an OO and report people to the FCC for using amateur frequencies for commercial means by monitoring Pactor III MBO's and forgot about it a bit. Then I got PO'd over the idot MBO that came up on top of my QSO, and realized that I had no way of telling who the idot MBO was. So thinking that I am cheap and at the same time thinking I'm PO'd about this, I thought well maybe if a group of people put up a bounty, a prize, staged a contest, what ever you want to call it for the first software developer who can come up with a stand alone Pactor III reception and decoding program, that would be just the ticket for me to find out who the jammers are behind the Pactor III system. Heck might even be able to look at some of the traffic which needs to be run over our scarce HF resources, and which we have all been assured is not commercial. Just imagine, every keyboard jockey running Fldigi, gMFSK, MixW, Multi PSK or one of the others out there firing up a program to monitor and report to the FCC any violations of the regulations of the Amateur service, like commercial use of amateur radio spectrum. Quite a vision of the future. So do you think the ARRL would sponsor this contest, or should a group of like minded amateurs pass the hat and start the contest? A random rant.
