The petition was primarily intended to restrict modes based upon bandwidth. Looking at this from an HF perspective, I used to think this was a good compromise to take, and even thought of myself as being "progressive" for supporting this approach. After listening to those who have experienced increased "freedom" in other parts of the world, often on this group, I am much less supportive.
I know there is a group of you who do not like discussions of digital issues of these types, and sharing this information with new people coming on the group, but there are few other ways to find this out through the democratic process which requires each one of us to "sift and winnow" until we determine what makes sense to us. And our views may change over time, if we are willing to listen to others and make an informed decision. I like to think that the members of groups such as this are much better informed than the average ham. The claim that hams want a mostly unregulated environment is not factual. Most of us want an orderly system of some kind that allows for experimentation but does not penalize the majority of users. If we went to a BW restricted approach what would change? It would prevent wide digital modes from interfering with narrow modes at the lower parts of the bands, although they don't tend to do that now, particularly in the Extra Class portions. The voice modes are not going to fit in a 500 Hz BW, which is the next step up in size, so that would really not change much from what we have now with an admixture of text digital modes at the upper parts of the text data sub bands. The one hope that I had was that we would have wide areas in the phone/fax/image sub bands that would allow text data to be mixed with voice and image data. From my perspective, this is the ONLY thing that I see of real value in the BW proposal. The irony is that the ARRL has said that they intend to develop band plans that would prevent that from happening! That is when I really had to reconsider this whole approach. What possible benefit would it have on the HF bands? The main group that is upset in the extreme is the Winlink 2000 folks who believe it is nearly the end of the world without moving in the direction they expected. They believe that the situation is intolerable that they are being squeezed into the small subbands for their wide Pactor 3 mode and can not expand further. As their administrator put it recently "Over 95 percent of the Winlink 2000 operation is within the Auto sub-bands." Also, the view is that "Winlink 2000 has NO MORE ROOM on the Amateur bands for its current daily operations much less EmComm or any other expansion." They say this even though they could operate ANYPLACE they want to in the text digital sub bands as long as they operate 500 Hz or less in width. And this is a much more efficient use of spectrum in most cases when you consider our shared frequencies. As it is we lost text digital spectrum on 80 and 40. Even under the withdrawn ARRL proposal, there would not have been ANY wide modes (3 kHz) below 3650. Now we don't even have anything for digital above 3600! What I think Winlink 2000 really wanted badly was the FCC to adopt the change of 97.221 to read: (c) On 160 through 12 meters, a station transmitting a RTTY or data emission may operate under automatic control except it is not permitted to initiate a communication. This is what is known as "semi-automatic" operation. They initially even tried to stop all "fully automatic" operation to eliminate any possible competition by AX.25 packet or other automatic forwarding systems, . (Note: This was based upon the ARRL Committee that came up with recommendations to the board. This committee was a stacked deck with pro Winlink 2000 members AND it even had two owners of the Winlink 2000 system on the committee! A dark day for democratic decision making indeed). Thankfully, the Board of Directors saw through some of this and rescinded their decision to eliminate fully automatic stations). Who else really lost anything on HF with the withdrawal of the ARRL proposal? 73, Rick, KV9U jgorman01 wrote: > I must be one of the stupid folks that have a "misconception" about > what the withdrawn petition was to accomplish. > > Could you enlighten us on just exactly what "modes" are being blocked > by the current regulations. What bands do these modes operate on? > What is the purpose of the blocked modes? > > The ARRL stated that very wide multi-tone modems ARE allowed under > current regulations and I guess I'm just not educated enough to know > that implementation of some better modes are being blocked. Heck, > pactor 3 only operates at 100 baud. Does SCS have an even better > modem that works at something over 300 baud? > > Jim > WA0LYK > > --- In [email protected], "Bill Vodall WA7NWP" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > >>> NO ONE wants to hamper experimenting but at the same >>> time no one should want to crush other older modes ... >>> >> No one wants to crush the older modes -- but they can't block moving >> to new modes and that's what's happening now. >> >> >> Bill, WA7NWP >> >> > > > > Announce your digital presence via our Interactive Sked Page at > http://www.obriensweb.com/drsked/drsked.php > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > >
