I think I can answer some of your questions. The ARRL definitely has taken the issue of having some kind of workable network for emergency to heart. At least the past president did. After doing a test to demonstrate how effective amateur radio networking is, we were unable to deliver messages in a reasonable time frame and could not handle messages with large amounts of data since NTS is primarily geared for 25 or so words per message. My understanding was that he was embarrassed over our inability to perform all that well.
The impression I have had (and someone correct me if they know otherwise) is that then, out of desperation, he appointed a committee of the two main Winlink 2000 owners along with mostly strong proponents of Winlink 2000 to come up with a solution. Needless to say, the solution was forced upon anyone on the committee who did not agree and one of the worlds top digital developers of amateur radio software of all time resigned from the committee under protest. And another major amateur radio software developer stayed on the committee and issued a minority report protesting what he felt was a railroad job. This committee initially went so far as to recommend destruction of the existing digital ham networks that used HF communications. You should be happy with that as they wanted to stop the fully automatic "robot" stations and, in particular, to stop the NTS/D which has used the Winlink "classic" software which sends traffic primarily through amateur radio. They wanted to end all fully automatic operation and only allow semiautomatic operation. Remember that the same people who own and control Winlink 2000 where the same people who at one time owned and controlled the Winlink "classic" system (and before that the Aplink system and the Netlink system). They later allowed it to be used by others (including MARS) and now deeply regret letting anyone else have this software and have been rather blunt about it. The changing of the rules is primarily changing the bandwidths of signals, rather than their modes. I tend to favor that although from what I have read from ARRL HQ statements, they will still have bandplans and the bandplans may not allow for mixed modes, even though the FCC rules would allow for them. Most of us want to follow the bandplans as much as possible, at least I do, but find things hard to fathom at times. I would have wanted a few areas on HF for wider BW subbands for high speed networking primarily intended for emergency use. Perhaps a few KHz for 6 or even wider subbands. Especially considering the grandfathering in of very wide band AM operation. But there is little support for this and so these modes will likely never be developed. The ~3 KHz BW area is very limiting for higher speed and/or more robust data modes even though there are some folks here who believe that the laws of science can be overcome and we can have not only a robust digital voice mode in 3 KHz, but can have multiple streams. Maybe hams can figure out something that science has not, but I really doubt it. If the ARRL leadership chooses wrongly, there could be long term ramifications. This is the risk you take with a representative type of democratic organization. We elect the the board to set policy. Most of us provided a lot of recommendations to our Division Directors before they voted on this, so it was not done in a vacuum as some seem to suggest. I think most members are not going to be all that upset with what is in effect a shrinking of the CW exclusive subbands (although they could be used for other narrow band modes such as PSK31 and maybe some others that have not been invented yet to fit in that size of bandwidth), a shrinking of the fully automatic subbands, and allowing wider modes to have a much larger subband area. This means that analog voice can be expected to expand downward as well but based upon the ARRL statements from the Executive Director, I expect that there will be bandplans that try to separate analog voice from digital voice or digital data. This is going to be almost impossible to enforce since for years the SSTV folks have had their image data smack in the voice area and then have been using digital image and from what I understand some experimental digital voice in the voice subbands. It would be very difficult to tell them to move down. In fact, you may note that it is not coincidence that the current SSTV frequencies were selected to fall in the Advanced Class portions of the bands. No one wants to lose priveleges that they have had. This is the one lesson that we should have all learned from the Incentive Licensing disaster that was such an expensive lesson. 73, Rick, KV9U N6CRR wrote: > Rick you make some good points in your post, and I think the ARRL > should take them into consideration as they work on the question of > Amateur support to disaster relief operations. I doubt they will however. > > Having said that, how is changing the current rules to allow more > digital data systems to operate on HF bands where they don't operate > now a good thing? The league, the Winlink folks and others are moving > the Amateur Service in a direction that they think is appropriate, but > without the consent of those folks who are the stakeholders now. A > very bad move in my book. > > > > > Need a Digital mode QSO? Connect to Telnet://cluster.dynalias.org Other areas of interest: The MixW Reflector : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/themixwgroup/ DigiPol: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Digipol (band plan policy discussion) Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
