The ARRL promoted the use of digital modes and that includes Pactor modes which have been with us for two decades now. The Winlink 2000 system, and the earlier systems, such as Winlink and Netlink (somewhat with Aplink), all used proprietary systems of Pactor and Clover II. Clover II support was dropped a few years ago and only Pactor modes are now used on Winlink 2000.
If there were new, low cost sound card modes that could handle messaging, such as is available with the Linux OS, you might find that fewer radio amateur would spend the large sums to acquire the expensive proprietary products and would move toward narrower bandwidth modes that also could (and should) be monitored as required under our self policing rules. Pactor II and especially III are claimed to be difficult to nearly impossible to decode with software. Even if you have a P3 modem and monitor some of these transmissions, it is no guarantee that you can decode the actual data. It would require special software to be able to do this. At one time the Winlink 2000 owners were pleased that they had something close to encryption without calling it that. But at least one ham claimed he had written a program in a few minutes that can read the data. I have not heard of any details since and that was over a year or two ago. All amateur modes should be easily monitored in order to insure that legal data is being sent. But it does not seem to be happening at this time with the P2 and P3 modes. I wonder of any OO's can even monitor content. 73, Rick, KV9U N6CRR wrote: > > Good why don't they resubmit with a new regulatory standard that no > proprietary waveforms will be allowed to operate on any Amateur radio > frequency? > > If you want to use your modulation/coding scheme on Amateur > frequencies, you would be required to release under say the GPL scheme. > > That would allow independent software developers to develop tools > which allow the amateur community to self police operations and > monitor operations and traffic, precluding the real or imagined issue > of commercial use of Amateur radio spectrum...full stop. > > >
