[Novice-Rigs] Re: Those Obsolete Skills

[Brian Carling]

On 13 May 2004 at 10:30, reformschool at juno.com wrote:

> I hear about all these communications systems
> that basically dumb down operations to the point
> that radiomen are replaced by techs that are taught
> to press da button.  The person that really has a
> grip on what is happening is no longer at the
> control, but rather some engineer or manager
> at some other level.  The man at the mic or keyboard
> or whatever is no longer required to understand
> the elements of radio, much less develop the skills
> needed to make radio work.  It's all done for the
> op by automation.  Something seems out of whack,
> here, do ya think?  

Gary & Co - I WOULD copy this to GB but it would touch of a
long thread that would be off topic there.
Here we don't care so long as it is about amateur radio.
the thing is this:

Do you wonder why you cannot operate anywhere from 14095 to 14100?
All the frequencies, are already "owned" by Winlink! 
They are using Pactor-III, developed for commercial communications, in the mode 
that is 1500 Hz wide, and completely cover the 
automatic subbands for own personal robot use. 
Here are the frequencies they cover:

14095.3,  14096.8

95.5
97.0
98.0
99.5
101.0
102.5
101.0
102.5
102.0
103.5
103.5
105.0
106.0
107.5
108.5
110.0
108.4
109.9
109.2
110.7

We slept through it while the FCC was talked into 
changing the rules to allow these robots to permanently 
take these frequencies. I didn't even know about it until 
recently but had wondered why I got so much heavy,
chirping QRM. It's far worse than that Russian Woodpecker
ever was!

Pactor-III is much less efficient than Pactor-II, because it 
takes up to 5 times more bandwidth for only a 50% speed gain.

They can be presumed to OWN these frequencies, because:

1. They are published
2. They only respond to calls on those published frequencies
3. When called on those frequencies, they override anyone else 
trying to use the frequency, because the mobile station does not care, and the 
land station is a fully automatic robot what cannot listen for traffic because nobody 
is there!

Below the official digi sub-band,  just the Winlink stations in 
North America (there are more farther away) the frequency 
ranges their robots dominate by the same practices. 

They are all over 14064 to 14115 Khz and often below that.
Note that the high end of the CW band is usurped and the 
entire rest of the data segment until you reach the RTTY 
segment. There is only a 2.5 Khz free space for PSK31 but there 
is no interference-free space for PSK63 from 14072.5 to 14075.0.
I have heard them even intrude into the PSK31 segment at times.

It makes me a little angry and disappointed about the 
"unhuman" future of amateur radio.

These unattended Pactor robot stations are mostly there to
give free internet e-mail to maritime stations, rather than for 
real amateur radio type conversations.