In answer to your questions...
. did not have any luck with a connect from anyone other than local hams on both 141A and ALE400 , but the bands were in particularly bad shape over the weekend . Am in the process of installing a 800watt solid state amp at VE5GPM, so will try that later this week , probably running 300 W on both ALE400 and 141A.. will let you know where/when. GPM is located at an EOC and I have remote control abilities on that station. Very interested in seeing how this works for text messaging up to 3K in size. . Have given up on the PCALE and HFlink bunch, since there seems to be no interest in doing anything other than sending 1 line messages to each other , or simply sounding. The MARS version of PCALE might work, but the author is not allowing use of this software outside of the MARS side. why is anyone's guess. As far as I can see no progress has been made to get some sort of practical message handling system in place, using ALE to establish contacts. . Have not talked to Dmitri for some time so have no idea where he is at with RFSM8000 . It is a great piece of software, requires fairly strong signal to operate at any speed. Still play with it from time to time. . From our point of view have thrown in the towel and will likely go with SCS Modems using Pactor 3 for some of the longer haul stuff we do, and our served agencies seem ready to purchase the necessary gear. Still interested in a sound card messaging mode which could link to the internet when required. . Am going to send Patrick a separate email about doing a striped down version of multipsk for emergency comms, something that would do PSK,MFSK,Olivia and the ALE modes, and nothing else...AND with a message gateway... that's all I want for next Christmas , hee hee. . Am anxious to get a few folks experimenting with modes suitable for emergency comms, up and using them somewhere John VE5MU Hi John, Did you have any luck with either station getting a connect? I tried both frequencies last night but no luck. The 141A mode is not very sensitive compared to the more modern modes developed in the past decade. Have you considered the FAE400 mode for this purpose? I am not sure if it has the capability to do what you want in terms of networking, but it works very much deeper into the noise. Can the FAE modes do what the 141A type of mode can do? I have only used FAE400 for ARQ chatting, which I really liked, but almost no one else did:( I can hear some 141A transmissions on 14.109 this morning but not able to decode them. Tried calling QRZ but no luck either. Based on their signal strength, they would decode very well with most of the sound card modes. Can you update us on how things are going with the RFSM8000 product? My wife and I have been testing digital modes, particularly the ARQ messaging modes, and if nothing else, the RFSM2400 software seems to be the easiest messaging software available. Even though we can not use this on MF/HF (except maybe for image, but who knows, as the FCC won't even respond to requests for clarification here in the U.S.), it is certainly legal to use on 6 meters and up and might be a workable solution for some public service oriented hams. Isn't it ironic that after all these years we still do not have any HF sound card messaging system that can even approach what we had with packet BBS systems? There is at least one HF packet group in my state which appears to be a casual group with similar interests, however the baud rate makes it difficult to get messages through and when I have monitored, there are mostly retry after retry. If they went to say, the 110 baud speed, it would work a lot better. But then again, the hardware probably makes that impossible. 73, Rick, KV9U