I tend to be very supportive of new modes that enhance amateur radio, particularly digital ones. As an early adopter of Amtor, then Pactor, and even Clover II for short while, using the Aplink and later the Winlink system (not the same as Winlink 2000), and now many years later the sound card modes, I very much look forward to technology that stays within the rules of sharing a limited resource with many thousands of licensed users.
The only pitfall that I have been concerned about thus far with ALE is the issue of having many frequencies on separate bands and transmitting on those bands without knowing if the frequency is in use. As long as that is addressed, it could work well for certain ham uses. Some early digital hams used to do this with Selcal and autostart RTTY equipment. Even though ALE is more sophisticated, it seems that it is very similar in the result. If I understand Bonnie correctly from her recent post, PC-ALE does not scan for frequencies and instead remains on one frequency. When you read the HFlink website, you read that "When not actively in a QSO with another station, each HF SSB transceiver constantly scans through a list of frequencies, listening for its callsign." Since I am cursorily familiar with commecial use of ALE, I took that to mean that it could be on one amateur band or several bands. This type of frequency scanning had been done years ago by Aplink and Winlink systems, so it is not something new to the amateur bands. Having a signal detect system with a timer for a reasonable monitoring period, makes it much more practical for robot equipment to detect when modulation occurs on the frequency and reset the timer. This is how SCAMP worked. It was not a few milliseconds, but rather, it would run a continuous test for many seconds to insure of the hidden transmitter problem. In order to make that work even better in other than the automatic subbands, you would likely have to extend that to a few minutes unless there was some way to QRL the frequency. 73, Rick, KV9U Andrew O'Brien wrote: >Joe/Rich, > >IF PC-ALE good prove that it never transmits when the frequency is in use, >would you have any other objections ? I'm just trying to make sure I >understand your issues. > >By the way, I have designed a "QRL" test for PC-ALE. I'll let you know the >results when I have completed the test. > >Andy K3UK > > > 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/
