Hey man love you videos. I did not follow how the participating stations knew when to receive digital and when to receive voice? Some elaboration on that part would be most helpful. Thank you. 73
Ooh, good question. Thank you! The short answer is that on 60 meters, we have both the sound up so we can hear voice, and the computer listening so that it will pick up digital. Even when I have the rig in USB (for voice), the software is still running and monitoring the rig's sound, so I can receive whether the rig is in USB or USB-data. I have both VFO-A and VFO-B tuned to the same channel, one USB and the other USB-data. Then if I need to transmit digital I can easily hit the VFO that has me in the right mode on freq to send digital, or vice-versa. (For what it's worth, In practice we've been running a lot more all-digital lately. Everyone has been really good at the base set of signals and net operation is so much more efficient, and capable through poor conditions. The past few months, we've been working up on 40 meters during mid-day, 80 meters at night, with 60 meters more of a transitional spot in the spectrum. That's just how coverage throughout Ohio has been working for us. I expect that as we get out of summer and later in the solar cycle we'll see things looking more like what we were doing a few years ago and at different times of year. That said, we still have that unique capability on 60 meters so sometimes there are other reasons to be there like US Government interoprability, so we need to keep that flexibility practiced!)
Interesting. How would you go about check-ins and traffic directing digitally? Using phone seems straight forward but I've digital or send cumbersome? How do you do it?
We can (and, in fact, typically now) run all digital, falling back to voice only to pick up and support an untrained operator. Here's an example of a net running all digital, with some commentary. This is especially good because it starts out so sparse, little opportunity for relay. It wouldn't work at all if we had to do this with voice control. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-e-sFDo5BHQM.html
Much of amateur spectrum divides voice and digital emissions. It isn't common but certainly can happen where rules allow. In practice, we have since moved to almost all digital operation, with fallback to voice where needed to get information to or from operators inexperienced with our operating mode. Voice and data together in the same circuit is more common in US Government auxiliary systems.
