Do you really know if Pactor was licensed to others? If SCS actually fully licensed the mode, it would seem to me that they would insure that the memory ARQ would have been included. Only the SCS modems seemed to have this feature. That is why they worked better between SCS modems than between other manufacturers products, even between the SCS modem and other manufacturers.
For quite some time my main software/hardware mix was an AEA CP-1 with BMKMulti. Crude by today's standards but worked well for RTTY, CW, AMTOR. Instead of upgrading when he added Pactor, I unfortunately sold all my digital equipment to buy the HAL P-38 modem which turned out to be a complete disaster. The HAL P mode (an attempt to simulate the Pactor mode) was pathetic with dropping what appeared to be a solid link, etc. They tried many software updates, but nothing improved. Clover II, which was a nice mode, could not work deep into the noise and so was very limited. Even when I used to try and chat with Ray Petit, W7GHM, the inventor of CCW, Clover and Clover II, with marginal link conditions, Clover II would rarely work well. If we had had PSK31, MFSK16, FAE400, etc. like we do today, our chats would have been fine as signals were clearly copyable by ear. From all information, including from Bill Henry at HAL, SCS would not license Pactor modes. 73, Rick, KV9U Demetre SV1UY wrote: > Of course they licensed PACTOR 1 and Kantronics, MFJ, AEA and others > made a mess of PACTOR 1 because they were not able to implement it > properly. > > They could ask SCS for the license of PACTOR 2 but they were not even > able to copy PACTOR 1 properly, never mind PACTOR 2. I still have a > KAM plus, but it's this modem even on HF PACKET performed horribly > compared to the SCS Modems. > > The only guy that managed to write a decent program that worked fine > in PACTOR 1 and many other modes including AMTOR, was G4MBK. His > software BMKmulti could do RTTY, AMTOR and PACTOR 1 but it needed a > homemade modem or terminal unit to work. It run in DOS mode and I > still have mine loaded in my Olivetti Quaderno (an A5 sized DOS > Laptop). An other 2 soundcard Pactor 1 implementations, one in DOS and > the other in Linux I hear that they never worked properly. > >
