FCC Extends Waiver Permitting Use of PACTOR 4 for Hurricane Relief Efforts

The amount of fines is irrelevant to the FCC. The funds go into the General Fund. just like other regulatory agencies, the FCC receives NO MONEY from fines.

 

Simply untrue. The baud limit was placed long before terrorism was a concern (by decades).

 

That's not true at all.
It is non-factual.
It is absurd.

 

When the 300 baud limitation was added to the rules , , The government had a limitation on being able to LISTEN INTO the faster baud rates. YES You can say the baud rate issue was there long before the Terrorists That is a true statement but only a partial conclusion . Big brother listening in was their reasoning . Monitoring I believe is the correct verb
Back when this rule was enacted the fcc WAS limited by the monitoring equipment they had .
COPY :
The ARRL, in its Petition, addresses the “bandwidth” issue, noting the following: PACTOR 4, which has a symbol rate of 1800 bauds, a mark-space frequency shift separation of less than 1kHz, and a bandwidth of 2.4 kHz, is not permitted by the current rules at HF. However, it is capable of a data rate of 5800 bits per second. By contrast, PACTOR 3, which has a symbol rate of 100 bauds, a mark-space frequency shift of less than 1 kHz, and the same 2. 4 kHz bandwidth, is permitted by the current rules at HF, and it is capable of a data rate of 3600 bits per second. These protocols are each able to operate in a bandwidth no greater than that of a typical single-sideband (SSB) voice emission.
Summary
The proposal as presently suggests a 2.8khz bandwidth be used to determine what digi transmission can or cannot be used.

This would mean @2.8 KHZ the P-4 which is 2.4 KHZ wide would be allowed even though this speed is 1,800 baud .

 

Back when the rule was instituted.
The only available commercial devices were only capable of a max speed of 300 baud .

Given today's possibilities If the rule is to be changed denoting Band width . Given compression and what is presently out there P-4 will be slow compared to the capability .

 

There may be international treaty issues at play that we're not aware of when it comes to the baud rate limit. Some governments want amateur radio communications to be significantly limited in capability so that it does not compete with government-taxed commercial services or as a means of bypassing government regulations. That's partly the reason we have third-party traffic rules with certain countries.

 

This, and some of other statements in this thread are factually wrong.

The third-party restrictions come out of the 1927 and 1932 ITU Conferences, and represented the state-of-the-art in the 1930s.

At this time, amateur radio was conceptually quite similar to commercial services, and Governments had a generally dim view about possible competition in international telecommunications.

To my knowledge, no other country has a "baud rate limit" in its regulations, and the US limit comes out of the 1970s technology state for "cheap" data communications.

What the FCC wanted to avoid was any indiscriminate use of simple FSK and FEK waveforms using "high" data rates on HF channels which just would take up excessive bandwidth together with providing very bad bit error rates on ionospheric channels.

Already in the mid-70s, there were HF modems with data rates exceeding 1200 bps on the market, but at a price.

The Harris 39-tone and the Collins
MIL-188-110 "Kineplex" modems could provide 2400 bps in a 3 kHz channel
"on a sunny day".

Somewhat less expensive medium rate modems using primitive DSP technologies were "in the making".
An early example was the CRC-Canadian Marconi-Glenayre 600 bps system, that was used in some Arctic data circuits and also was considered for the early 80s airborne
HF data link system that eventually evolved into the ARINC 753 HFDL system.

I would say that the 300 baud restriction is just another sign of the general backwardness of the FCC.

73/
Karl-Arne
SM0AOM

 

That is false.

 

Yeah , but,............ They do get brownie points