works great for 2m ssb. makes DX rag-chews less tedious and weak signals easier to copy. 8ish years ago we ran it on 2m ssb and found we could easily talk with weak stations without riding the volume/rotator/agc/etc. freedv really should rebrand itself as the right way to enjoy vhf/uhf. but then motorola would have to pay to recycle all their old repeaters. literally fascism.
My former Qualcomm boss, N6NKF (SK), used to tell me that in their previous company Linkabit, they had a saying: "modes kill modems".
It's still pretty good for these very low data rates. As the saying goes, it's not that the elephant dances well, it's that it dances at all that's amazing. Dave Rowe VK5DGR is, as far as I can tell, the world leader (not just in ham radio) in very low bit rate voice compression.
In the US, at least, it's considered a "phone" mode and regulated as such. YMMV if you live elsewhere, of course.
Thank you for clearing that up. I do not do FT8 but isn't FT8 connected to audio. At my age all I remember are 6146A's Ed Rios
Wouldn't it make sense to create a new digital telephony segment just above digimodes? The reduced bandwidth from Free DV (1 KHz instead of 2.6) would release bandwidth and create more channels for telephony, not to mention freeing up additional bandwidth for digimodes. 73 de OE6FEG/M0FEU Matt
It's a phone mode. The band segments are phone segments, not SSB segments. AM is allowed in the phone segment, too. SSTV is allowed in the phone segment as well. Should we move digital repeaters to the digital part of the 2M band too? That doesn't make any sense, now does it? Using an SSB transmitter for digital modes, doesn't make them phone modes. The emission designator for FT8 is J2D. How does moving digital voice into the CW/digital segment free up additional bandwidth for digital modes? I get it, SSB operators don't want to hear digital voice modes bleating out of their radio. I get it. AMers don't want SSB going all Donald Duck out of their speakers, either.
I spent time talking with the FreeDV team at Pacificon this year, and came to the conclusion that without major adoption this just felt like another option in the mix. This speaks to the amateur radio community’s inability to consolidate standards or move on to new more efficient ones when the time is right.
I didn't say move it into the CW/digimodes segment. I meant it would sit at the bottom of the SSB segment, and JUST ABOVE the digimodes segment. 3 Free DV channels need only 3KHz of bandwidth, whereas, 2 SSB channels need 5.2KHz of bandwidth. That means, telephony would gain an extra channel and digimodes would gain 2.2KHz of additional bandwidth. Please correct me if I've made a mistake. 73 Matt
Less bandwidth. I've used DSTAR on HF to the UK multiple times. The nice thing about FreeDV is how little bandwidth it occupies. If you don't care about noise-free reception, and are more of an AM or ESSB operator solely focused on "audio", then neither of these modes would work for you.
Not meaning to alarm anyone but I downloaded 32 bit and 64 bit versions. AVG reports MalOb-IJ (Cryp) and sent the files to quarantine. Is this a false positive from AVG Anti-virus? Anyone else reporting this?
