I was a major Amtor operator many years ago when it was popular, and later with Clover II, but neither are found on the ham bands anymore. You would likely need to sked with someone to use these legacy modes. The main hardware ARQ mode is Pactor, but that is mostly used for e-mail systems.
Amtor had its shortcomings with a limited character set, and it's ARQ and weak signal capabilities were not that good. When your equipment tried to copy weak signals, you would start to get false characters. And the signal strength would actually be pretty good (by today's standards) when this happened. Those same signals today, would be easily copyable with many of the non ARQ sound card modes. Perhaps you might look into the sound card modes for an even better experience. While very few hams will use ARQ modes for chatting, there are a few of us who are willing to do this. And you will find some hams on this group who like to have chats on hardware modes, particularly Pactor. In the past year, we have had what at least I consider to be major breakthrough with new sound card ARQ modes! The best that I have tested is the FAE400 mode, but it is only available in the Multipsk program. It is not that common to hear it but last night a station was calling CQ on the higher end of the 80 meter text data portion of the band. It has a distinctive sound but I could not decode his signal consistently and he did not respond to me either. Then I noticed that the Multipsk program had some odd behaviors with an extra line in the mode mark points and cruder looking text on the program itself. I rebooted the program and then it started to work properly so it must have been some kind of glitch. By the time I was ready to call him, another station answered his call and so I did not pursue it. But that means that we had at least three of us that will work the mode on 80 meters:) One station I believe was from Indianapolis. It is interesting that FAE400 is very similar to the way Clover II worked. No over command. You just type on the keyboard and the machines work out the sending and receiving. It seems more robust than Clover II with weaker signals but I can not be sure since it probably has been more than a decade since I last worked that mode. Several of my contacts were calls to my CQ by the Clover and Clover II inventor, Ray, W7GHM and we had great difficulty making it work since signals were weak between Washington and Wisconsin with both of us using modest dipoles. Those same signals today should work quite well with several of the sound card modes. Of course, unlike Clover II, it can not scale up in speed for stronger signals. Has anyone compared Clover II to current sound card technology when it comes to the weak signals? If I had GNU/Linux back on one of my machines, I would give serious consideration to trying out PSKmail. In addition to the e-mail capability, it also has a full ARQ chat mode too. It may be difficult to find anyone else in the U.S. to try this without a sked since hardly anyone uses GNU/Linux here, but there are some strong proponents, so it is possible. I was recently contacted by a well known ham who has been active for many years with public service/emergency work, and he asked me about PSKmail. Since I have very limited knowledge of this system, I looked up their server count and was surprised to see that there are maybe half a dozen now here in the U.S. It suggests to me that there may be an increasing number of experimenters with this system, but I can't get any others who do public service to move in that direction in my local area. Maybe this will change if GNU/Linux gets to be popular enough to trigger a critical mass? Maybe wishful thinking on my part for the short term (5 years) but maybe not for a decade or so out if many other countries really do adopt it? 73, Rick, KV9U deweygroups wrote: > Thanks. Would still like to know about Amtor. Has it pretty much > been killed off by PSK? > > Dick - W6CCD > >
