[RTTY] RTTY Digest, Vol 135, Issue 33

[Michael Adams]

Peter N5UWY wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 11:01 AM, John Becker <w0jab at big-river.net> wrote:
> 
> > Most of what I see is a "position report"
> > see    http://www.winlink.org/userPositions
> > date, time deg's north/south by east/west.
> > Or something like tell mom I will be in PORT NAMED tomorrow.
> 
> So why do the sailors insist that they need huge swathes of bandwidth to
> transmit a few bytes of data?

Most of them...at least the clueful ones... know they don't need much bandwidth for position reports (although the need for ARQ does add to the overhead).

The need for bandwidth/speed arises when there's a message waiting from someone who doesn't realize brevity is a virtue.

It doesn't take much of a message for a narrow sub-300bps signal to become painfully slow, and potentially problematic if conditions aren't the best.

(This isn't to say, however, that more couldn't be done to more efficiently use the automated subbands.)

-- 
Michael / N1EN