I wish to keep Olivia in our minds and operating practices. A new releases of DM780 with Olivia may be out soon and perhaps bring a few new users. Multipsk and MixW already have Olivia. While beta testing DM780, I have made an effort to work more Olivia and I am reminded just how remarkable this mode is at digging out signals. Last night I was on 160M with extreme local line noise , no audible Olivia signals, and nothing that I could discern in the waterfall. I noticed a string of CQs and a callsign a on my screen. Since the callsign looked familiar, I assume i had discovered an oddity in DM780 and DM780 was somehow still displaying a CQ string from the previous day when i was copying PSK31. I have good ears for very weak signals (from my old SWL days of listening for Radio Tistan Da Cuhna on 90M) , and would have insisted there was no signal present. I was in the middle of whisking off a email to Simon about the DM780 oddity when the CQ string scrolled across the screen and I was able to tell that I was copying a live signal.
So, with the HF propagation conditions being quite poor , we have established ALE as a very useful method of communication since Steve, Charles, and Patrick added improvements to the software. We should now perhaps remember to add Olivia to our bag of digital tricks, it is quite simply the best for most weak signal conditions. -- Andy K3UK www.obriensweb.com (QSL via N2RJ)
