> Simon HB9DRV wrote: There's a lot more to Olivia than being
multi-tone MFSK.
I am aware of that, Simon.
However, Olivia is currently the most popular digital mode other than
PSK31 and RTTY, and the question was if ROS 16 baud was worth using
twice the bandwidth of Olivia. We hoped that it would be, because on
UHF, space is not at a premium as it is on HF, but ROS 16 baud, (the
spread spectrum variation) at 2250 Hz width, was not even as good as SSB
phone under the fast Doppler flutter conditions. So, as a choice of
modes currently available, either MFSK16 (my personal preference on HF,
but impractical on UHF due to the necessity to tune so accurately and
have little or no drift) or Olivia, is a far better choice than ROS, and
performs better.
We would like nothing better if there were a mode that outperformed
Olivia at equivalent typing speed, and could copy further into the noise
than Olivia can, and is more tolerant to mis-tuning or drift than
MFSK16, but so far ROS is not the one. As things stand, CW (decoded by
ear) is currently the "last mode standing", but it seems it must be
possible to come up a mode that can beat CW under the typical conditions
found on UHF.
73 - Skip KH6TY
