Tone frequency spacing is large enough with 850 shift to provide
significant diversity effect, and many military and commercial FSK
modems are designed to take advantage of this, automatically
providing copy on one tone in the absence of the other. When this
is combined with another similarly capable modem in space
diversity, really excellent fade immunity is obtained.
Combination time and frequency diversity modems such as the
MD-1142 mentioned by Brooke Clarke are even more effective. These
were available surplus for a time, and several of us have them and
have experimented with them. THese 8-channel modems provide
remarkably low error-rate performance for non error-correcting
baudot teleprinters, even in disturbed conditions. The simpler
two channel frequency diversity mode of the MD-522, which provides
two 85-shift channels separated by about 2.4 kHz, is also
effective. The more modern military serial and parallel tone PSK
modems all have bit-interleaving, thus providing a time-diversity
effect.
I would be surprised if the current sound card based modems designed for amateur use include in-channel tone diversity capability, as most are oriented towards 170 shift, where little diversity effect occurs. Perhaps someone on the list familiar with the inner workings of these sound card modems can tell us whether any are capable of in-channel diversity on 850 shift...
73,
John K9WT
On frequency diversity, as shown at https://w6iwi.org/script/csvgraph.html?CsvUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fw6iwi.org%2Frtty%2FTuNotes%2Fms220517a.csv , there is some time offset in the fades of mark and space with 170 Hz shift, but not enough to keep one of them out of the noise. I need to run the experiment with 850 Hz shift.