Sorry to hear about your system being on a holiday from digital radio. "There is no Winlink 2000 organization that you can work from within. It is basically a closed group of maybe half a dozen (at most) owners. They dictate all the terms to the amateur community and tell us how we are to use their system, who can have a CMS or PMBO, etc."
In my limited dealings with winlink, looking at it as a gateway for emergency comms for us where we do not have any other service, the folks running the PMBO's are like any other Ham , interested in the hobby and reasonable people. So, ignoring the "owners" for a moment, what about appealing to the volunteer PMBO operators scattered around the country and outline the problems we are having with Pactor? for the most part they are interested in digi stuff as we are, the downside is that most have invested in a fancy modem as opposed to using nothing more than a sound card. It's easy to figure out who the public ones are, since they are listed on the software downloadable from the winlink site. The more difficult PMBO's to track down are the non-published ARES and other sites, but maybe a little CSI work would pay off. I am not suggesting "flaming" these operators in any way , but politely pointing out what theyare doing to the rest of the hobby. what may to them appear to be a public service is actually a disservice to the hobby. I know that there will be a predictable response from some pactor operators, telling us something to do with sex and travel. But for every one of these operators that we can convince to either quit or modify their operations, that would be one less source of QRM. Even if we convinced them to drop their 80M operations would be better than nothing. As for the ARRL, from what I have read it appears that the ARRL bowed to the requests of the SSB operators to push the SSB segment down to 3600, and lobbied the FCC accordingly. when the FCC acted, and there was a backlash from other users of 80M, then the ARRL said "oops" and changed their tune. I don't think we can wait for some new mode with anti QRM features, rather we have to be proactive in other ways.... John VE5MU ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 268.18.8/717 - Release Date: 3/10/2007 2:25 PM
