The more things change, the more they remain the same.

[k4kyv]

I ran into an interesting thread on QRZ.com this morning.  One of the posted replies reads as follows:
 

I think it is a little bit premature to write off analog systems, and the drive to do so comes from persons who see a personal advantage in stampeding ( or attempting to stampede ) people into going "all digital", deliberately flying in the face of common sense and rational objectivity in order to do so.

The emotional appeal to jump on the digital bandwagon is there because objective examination of the available information does not indicate this course of action.

It's a sales pitch, a crude experiment in social engineering that has nothing to do with advancing technology or science.

The only way it can be seen as advancing amateur radio would be if your end goal is to make amateurs appear to be easily manipulated... ( Great for marketing, great for politics, bad for the hobby. )

Note that with the digital elitists, the great preponderance of thier promotional effort goes into running down anything and everything else that isn't digital. This leaves one to wonder why this is the case, if the all-digital stuff really has such a clear-cut advantage.

This posting illustrates that to-day's push for digital is nearly identical to the decade-long crusade starting in the mid 50's, to force every amateur radio operator on the planet to convert from AM to SSB for voice communication.

Replace the word "digital" with "single-sideband", "analogue" with "AM" but otherwise leave it verbatim, and you have something that would have hit the nail on the head if it had been published in 1960:

I think it is a little bit premature to write off conventional amplitude modulation, and the drive to do so comes from persons who see a personal advantage in stampeding ( or attempting to stampede ) people into going "single sideband", deliberately flying in the face of common sense and rational objectivity in order to do so.

The emotional appeal to jump on the SSB bandwagon is there because objective examination of the available information does not indicate this course of action.

It's a sales pitch, a crude experiment in social engineering that has nothing to do with advancing technology or science.

The only way it can be seen as advancing amateur radio would be if your end goal is to make amateurs appear to be easily manipulated... ( Great for marketing, great for politics, bad for the hobby. )

Note that with the "sideband" elitists, the great preponderance of their promotional effort goes into running down anything and everything associated with amateur radio voice communication that isn't SSB. This leaves one to wonder why this is the case, if single sideband really has such a clear-cut advantage.

[WA3VJB]

Until now, AM was the only mode in ham radio that was actively and deliberately slammed by those who pushed what they alleged was "better."

As we've talked about before, CW was never targeted for obsolescence, insulted and spurned by commercial publishers when "phone" came in, so a peaceful transition took place and CW co-exists as a non-combative alternative to this day.

But somewhere someone decided a violent upheaval was needed to break people loose from AM, so the sales pitch began, and it required an effort to establish the merit of SSB by putting down AM.

Indeed, the parallels to digital are very similar. Unfortunately for digital, the footprint of digital voice modes seem to be just as large for the same information quality as what can today be accomplished with analog. So we face the prospect of having a "new" means of communication forced upon us with no clear advantage nor rationale for such a transition.

Probably why digital proponents seem so desperate at times to make their case.

What's missing for the time being is a direct confrontation that would seek to portray SSB as somehow less deserving of spectrum, and/or less justified as a continued mode of operation. That will be fun to see, if the digital buffs have the audacity to try what was done against AM.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Nice point Don. Unfortunately, most of the morons on QRZ.com don't have such a perspective. They don't understand that what they are defending replaced something else in the past.

Digital (like it or not) is just another in the line of changes in communications technology. It's here and it will only grow. To think otherwise is folly. Ham radio either needs to get on that bandwagon or be resigned to irrelevance.

This not to say we totally abandon legacy modes or go in for the propaganda approach used by the ARRL to push SSB in the past. Let new modes and operating practices earn their spot(s) in the amateur radio market place of ideas. The best stuff will win if intelligent people are given the chance to decide. Ramming something into place makes a less than optimum solution very likely. But defending analog while ignoring digital is just plain stupid.

[AF9J]

I read the thread Don is talking about.  Like many of you, I've dealt with digital stuff, and digital electronics for decades (hey, in college in 1984, it saved my grade in the first electronics course I took - digital electronics is gravy compared to analog).  It has its place (digital computers are much more versatile than analog computers), but I've never understood why people always seem to think digital is superior to analog for everything.  In sound applications (whether audio or RF Voice transmission), it requires an inordinate amount of sampling, processing, and bandwidth, to approach the fidelity of SSB, much less AM.  In weak signal use, digital voice is a joke, because the intelligibility cutoff for the signal is higher than it is for an analog signal, where if you have a good set of ears, you can still understand the other person if the static isn't too insane.  Oh yeah, and then there's time delays caused by processing the signal.  This can only be overcome by using more processing power, and still never approaches the speed of "processing" an analog signal.  Breaking into a roundtable becomes more problematic, due to the fact that what digital voice protocols there are, are proprietary, and often require synching up with the other station.

I think what Don mentioned is true - it's a lot of hype for marketing reasons.  I also feel that it plays upon the human nature mentality of "newer is always better."  It doesn't help when you have people like Bonnie Crystal KQ6XA (or as I like to think of her, when she holds court on the HFpack Yahoo board [where they treat her like every word she says is gospel], Queen Bonnie the First), shoving the "digital voice and [wideband digital modes in general] are the way of the future, don't be a luddite" mentality down your throat (she's notorious for flaming/ridiculing people who disagree with her stances, I've seen her do so).  Also, one of the problems, is that many newer hams aren't technically savy enough to understand the limitations (or advantages for that matter) of digital and analog modes of communication.  So they are easily swayed.

73,
Ellen - AF9J
Anxiously awaiting the shipment of her Globe 680 Scout (anybody got a cheap 3885 crystal I can buy, to use until I get my hands on a VFO?), and struggling with a frustrating HV AC hum problem in her Cheyenne's power supply

[Art]

"Let new modes and operating practices earn their spot(s) in the amateur radio market place of ideas. The best stuff will win if intelligent people are given the chance to decide."

This comment is probably one of the most incisive and clear responses to the ranks of the  digital "revolution".

I agree that digital is a mode and as such it will have supporters. Public safety communications has essentially converted to digital because digital has advantages in that application. (Although . . many a seasoned dispatcher would rather use their ears to decipher a weak signal as opposed to a digital signal cut off entirely due to insufficient signal strength.) In amateur radio digital is simply a mode among many others. CW, or phone, or model airplane, or FM repeater ops are not going to simply be converted to digital phone or keyboard because the digital (self purported) masses deride those modes. It is an ironic combination of ignorance and elitism that drives this effort to relegate popular modes to a highly premature death to further the digital agenda.

Art  W0BA

[w3jn]

^^ Like your new call, Art!! 

[Art]

Tnx John. . . . the new call made Pauls story of repeater operations even more amusing . . .

0 BA . . . hmmmm

[W3RSW]

As digital as we wanna be, we as biological creatures can't escape analog input and output.... and the analog (good ol' E&M wave progagation) transmission of information between.

Seems that our brains are massively parallel analog, quasi digital computers depending on varieties of analog input.  Electrical/Magnetic transmissions are wave/packet, and decidely analog type propagations (depending on the underlying theory, wave or quanta packet or lack of unity in describing such thereof.)

 Virtually all interfaces of animals are analog, even hypothetical ESP :)  Perhaps someday AI 'machines' may generate digital only languages to talk to each other, but the communication between 'them' will be by good ol' E&M waves, the more 'digital' of which will approach square wave appearance but then require filtering to eliminate wasteful infinite harmonics.  A lot of processing can be done digitally, virtual receivers, etc. but still processing for analog input and output.

Yeah, I agree will most on this thread; we're suckers for the latest and greatest; digital promises 100% copy but at the expense of a threshold down in the noise floor, hopefully somewhat greater than analog-only offers.  Much newly manufactured and always more expensive equipment will be sold, but as long as the end product of transmission is good ol' SSB or AM or CW and is backward compatible with anything sold since radio's inception then we don't have to buy a damn thing.. 

What finally kills a mode is a govt. mandate to quench it; e.g. digital HDTV vs. the ol' NTSC 520 line analog standard.  .. or potentially mandated elimination of DSB w/carrier we've all been fighting for years.  ... or wide band FM for emer. services that occured about 30 yrs. ago in the Motorola world. - Just making a point,... I realize that some of the newer standards are superior, especially for a captive service such as emer. communications and who can complain about the quality of HDTV? (given a world where no older equipment exists.)

But still, I get hot just tuning across the shortwave bands and hearing broacasting of DRM signals. Eventually 49 metros will sound like loran C and just as useful for legacy equipment.  I get just as hot listening to DRM signals on the ham bands using propriatary programs.  Can't wait till 40 sounds the same.. uh huh.
A lot of hype for an " improved" service. 

Well my diatribe monitor is going off so I better sign. :)
But just remember, wave propagation is "highly" analog, everything else is just processing, however you want to do it.

[WA1GFZ]

Imagine life if bill gates was into analog.
Analog bloat op amps with 100 feedback resistors in parallel.

[WD8BIL]

My old teletype setup with the old demoder (remember the 88mh inductors in that massive LC filter) wud just sit there printing out 60 wpm happy as a lark even when the signal faded to inaudible oblivion.

No that's dependability !!

[k4kyv]

But still, I get hot just tuning across the shortwave bands and hearing broacasting of DRM signals. Eventually 49 metros will sound like loran C and just as useful for legacy equipment.  I get just as hot listening to DRM signals on the ham bands using propriatary programs.  Can't wait till 40 sounds the same.. uh huh.
A lot of hype for an " improved" service. 

I am already hearing some DRM in the 40m ham band.  Also on 75m.  3990-4000 has been rendered useless during the evening hours by the German DRM station for several years now.  Occasionally there is a weaker one somewhere near 3960.

If DRM comes into widespread use on the SWBC bands, this will amount to a redefinition of sharing between amateurs and broadcasting.  We won't have a snowball's chance in hell of competing with 10 kHz wide, 250 kw DRM signals spaced uniformly across the "shared" portion of the bands.

But OTOH, shortwave broadcasting has all but been phased out in the industrialised countries, replaced by streaming audio over the internet, and rebroadcasts over local stations.  BBC no longer beams English broadcasts to N. America or Australia/NZ.  Radio Canada International is rarely heard here.  Same with Radio France Internationale.  But public broadcasting stations in the US increasingly are carrying BBC World Service during the off-hours of their regular programming. 

SWBC is now aimed primarily to third-world countries, where the listeners can be expected to possess little more than a cheap portable battery-operated analogue radio.  It will be a long time before the populations of those countries will have access to DRM receivers.  90% of the English SW radio broadcasts I can pick up here these days are domestic bible beaters.

[David, K3TUE]

In many ways, that is the appeal of radio for me - being able to afford it, understand it and implement it (affordably).  While I do understand pretty well the concepts of digital electronics and to some degree digital signal processing, I think, as a non-professional, I feel less drawn to push the envelope with digital radio experamentation.  It seems that the majority of those who are pushing the envelope are just buying increasingly expensive pre-made appliances which they don't come close to understanding (again, just like SSB was and to a great degree still is for many).  What fun is that?

[WA3VJB]

What fun is that?

Fun has dropped way down the agenda.

Appearance has taken its place or moved higher in priority.

Some of those who are pushing digital are paranoid that anything left as analog will look old-fashioned and vulnerable.

Using the same perception (and I don't agree with it) the same folks have had little to no success changing our demographic.

It will be more effective to to match our development plans with the age group of our people and their present-day interests.  For example, instead of trying to curry favor with "Winlink" buffs and their contituency of wealthy yachters, there should be an effort to promote our hobby alongside AARP, whose newsletters showcase "things to do."

Folks in the 50+ crowd they target are already favorable to "radio" because they grew up with it, and may have had a practical experience with it during message traffic handled re: Vietnam. The dropping of the CW testing requirement, with the minimal written test, makes that group prime pickins' for recruitment.