[GreenKeys] ASCII and Amateur Radio

[jhhaynes at earthlink.net]

ARRL used to broadcast the bulletins in ASCII, after Baudot and AMTOR FEC.
I don't know if they still do.

ASCII has never been very popular for amateur use, at least at HF.  The
lowest standard speed for ASCII machines was 110 baud, nearly 3 times the
45 baud we use with Baudot at 60 WPM.  And with 11 bits per character
instead of 7 the bits are correspondingly shorter.  The result is that you
need about 3 times the filter bandwidth and that means more noise.  And
then the scourge of HF is multipath, which is worse the shorter the bits
are.  So the bottom line is you need substantially better signals to get
good copy with ASCII than with Baudot.



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jhhaynes at earthlink dot net