Data

摘要

With the rapid growth in data on HF, perhaps it is time to rethink the band planning issues and where we should operate in the bands. Peter Martinez, G3PLX, has been thinking about this issue and he writes: "Traditionally, the HF amateur bands have been divided into SSB/voice at the top end and CW/digital at the bottom. In the early days, this was probably done so that operators on the different modes could find each other easily. By coincidence, it's always been the case that SSB is about 3kHz wide and CW/digital modes have always been much narrower. The popularity of PSK31, as the narrowest of the digital modes, has reinforced this idea that digital modes are narrow. Nowadays, the separation between voice and digital modes is not so much about concentrating activity where it can easily be found, but serves the purpose of minimising the interference which would be inevitable if modes of different widths were constrained to share the same part of the bands. However, the way things are at the moment, the wording of the bandplans is such that the division is between 'voice' and 'digital', not between 'wide' and 'narrow'.