[GreenKeys] ASCII and Amateur Radio

[Bob Camp]

Hi

About all I would add to that is

1) Most hams tried 110 WPM ASCII  with 170 shift gear. With 2 to 3X the 
stuff trying to go through the pipe that is not a real good way to go.

2) ASCII gear only really started to show up in ham channels in the mid 
1970's. Even then it was fairly hard to get a hold of. ASCII gear only 
became a common item at Dayton in the 80's. Five level gear was 
plentiful in the ham market from the end of WW2 on. Certainly there 
were a few hams out there with 35's in ham stations three days after 
they first rolled off the production line.  Most of us were not that 
well connected.

3) By the mid 80's stuff like HF packet and home computers both had 
shown up on the market in a big way. Most of the ASCII folks went the 
packet route.

4) For "rag chew" style communications 60 wpm is faster than most 
people can type. Since it's about 4X faster than a lot of people type 
it's plenty fast enough even with a tape punch / reader being used. A 
lot of RTTY on the air these days is computer to computer. They still 
set them to 5 level since 60 wpm works fine.

Of course the picture was a bit different on VHF. Many of the auto 
start nets used AFSK and 850 shift.  The filters were wide and simple 
on a lot of the TU's. That made ASCII a natural thing to try there. Of 
course that killed a lot of the nets since many did not have the ASCII 
gear to dedicate to 24 hour monitoring.

	Take Care!

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ


On Feb 4, 2005, at 10:06 PM, jhhaynes at earthlink.net wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> jhhaynes at earthlink dot net
>
>
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