Marine band going digital

[redbeard]

When I went to Portugal in 2008 to meet an old ham friend who retired there, the local Spanish and Portuguese sardine and sprat fishermen (persons?) were using 28MHz CB's to talk amongst themselves and their bases - I didn't hear any VHF marine band chatter and they probably don't need it. Do you think they gave a rats about the ITU - I doubt it.

Neither do our crab fishermen in Alaska who have been seen using 2 meter ham freqs on their TV show The Deadliest Catch.

Whatever works out with a new bandplan/digital modes you can count on the following 20yrs minimum people will still be using the old gear illegally or otherwise.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Not as good as analog.

Well the people that did a test run using NXDN seemed to like it better than analogue.

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

View attachment 160087

Well the people that did a test run using NXDN seemed to like it better than analogue.

The audio quality of these various vocoders is really not as good as "wide" +/- 5.0 KHz FM analog when in strong signal contour. These studies seem to focus on the fringe where the digital has an advantage.

 

[kayn1n32008]

The audio quality of these various vocoders is really not as good as "wide" +/- 5.0 KHz FM analog when in strong signal contour. These studies seem to focus on the fringe where the digital has an advantage.

Absolutely.

As someone who has professionally used radio since I got into the oil field in 2008, I'll take digital voice all day long.

I've used wideband analogue, narrowband analogue, DMR, NXDN and P25.

It get tiring to listen to picket fencing, static, squelch crashes(spent too many days on radio controlled roads that don't use PL/DPL) and wildly varying audio levels common to analogue. Modern digital voice, with modern AGC and DSP technology I'll take all day long over analogue.

 

[kayn1n32008]

The audio quality of these various vocoders is really not as good as "wide" +/- 5.0 KHz FM analog when in strong signal contour. These studies seem to focus on the fringe where the digital has an advantage.

These are users that have spent their careers using 25KHz FM, and were doing limited testing with 6.25kHz digital voice.

'Both users on the and the VTScenter were ENTHUSIASTIC about the quality of the digital voice and said that especially on the edges of transmission range the sound was clear and LESS TIRING to listen to.'(capitalization for emphasis by me)

Seems like they liked it all around, and especially liked it at the edge of coverage.

Picket fencing, squelch crashes and static ARE tiring to listen to.

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

Robotic sounds, extreme audio level changes and muffled words are tiring as well.

 

[merlin]

Military has goe to ARQ QPSK for their reasons but given the many thousands of VHF FM stations, very few want to invest in digital.
So, such change will not be any time soon. I will likely be dead before then.