Chris , ZL1BOE
you will be told by others that ALE is widely used to set up QSO's and QSY's using the one line message ability . You will also be told that it is used widely for keyboard to keyboard QSO's and that there are thousands of Hams using ALE ( last figure I heard was 6000) . These are folks who are using PCALE, who have aggressively set aside frequencies for ALE use in all bands, and are promoting ALE as the answer to emergency communications. Granted, PCALE, in its MARS form may be a great piece of software to pass messages from overseas but that ability is certainly not evident on the ham bands. The reality is that there are likely under 50 hams active with PCALE worldwide, those using PCALE spend most of the time sounding , with little , if any message traffic passed, and no QSO's. PCALE does not work very well into the noise, and is certainly not user friendly when setting up a rig and computer to run the program. Beyond using the sounding function there appears not to be much interest in running nets, or exploring emergency communications aspect of PCALE. ALE400 (multiPSK) might be closer to your needs since it is narrow band and works well into the noise. It can be readily used for soundings, file transfer, and is a pleasure to use for digital QSO's, keyboard to keyboard. The author is constantly working on the software, and appears to be moving closer to the Holy Grail of being able to pass messages and files from HF to the internet. It is simple to install, simple to use, (although the screen can be a little overwhelming at first) .There is a plan afoot which would see some extensive cross Canada testing of this mode to determine it's suitability for emergency communications. There are some other software out there to look at. NBEMS has promise, but , since it uses BPSK for the most part, suffers from multipath flutter and other ozone maladies. The authors state that it's intention was to run over VHF/UHF, and , while I haven't tried it, would probably work very well. This software is also under active development so will be interesting to see what other capabilities it will have. RFSM8000 gets very little mention on these reflectors, since hams in the USA cannot exceed 300baud speed. Dimitry and his team have posted the latest version which looks interesting , but haven't tried it, but is something we can run here in Canada on most bands except 30m.( bandwidth issues rather than speed) It apparently has the ability to pass traffic to and from the internet from HF, using a sound card modem. So much software, so little time.... 73's John VE5MU
