What Huge Mode Is This?

[K0OD]

While the League had stated that only PSK31 and Pactor III are allowed under the new 60 meter regs, a few hams claim that just about any digital mode <=2.8 kHz is allowed. Several have fired up on Contestia and Olivia. A few U.S. stations are using WSPR on 60 now. This can be a mess on a band with only 5 channels and where all digital/CW must be on center-channel.

This morning on 60 I heard what sounded like a QSO between two stations using a mode that was about 2 kHz wide on my Flex panadaptor. It had the shape of a mesa... steep vertical sides and fairly flat on top with one or two "notches" that moved slowly, rising in frequency across the mesa's top.

On 60 there are tons of oddball digital signals from primary users, but what I heard this morning was squarely centered in the ham channel and seemed to be two stations that alternated transmissions of several minutes each. One station was about s-9 and the other s-7.  My RSID showed nothing. My FLdigi couldn't print it although I'm hardly a digital pro. Several hams were asking what it was.

Ideas?

BTW, see latest letter from the NTIA on the mind-numbing subject of digital on 60:
http://www.eham.net/articles/27993

[VA7CPC]

A Pactor-III signal might look like that.   It wouldn't decode with anything but an SCS Pactor modem -- the algorithm is proprietary.

         Charles

PS -- According to some stuff I've read on the forums recently, the ARRL seems to have made a mistake in saying that only PSK31 and PACTOR-III was acceptable on 60m.  So there may be some back-pedalling in the next month or so.

[K0OD]

Thanks Charles!  That's probably it.

I think I considered every digital mode except that fairly obvious one considering it was on 60. But there had been no reports of Pactor III actually being used on the band. Until now. 

That signal was damn nasty stuff on a band with just five channels. By contrast, PSK is a snap to notch out. 

--
BTW, was hearing a loud WSPR beacon on 5371.611 an hour ago. Legal? who knows!

[N1ZZZ]

If each transmission was "several minutes each" then it wasn't P3.  P3 is like other pactors with each side transmitting for no more than a few seconds (5 maybe, although I've never timed it) before waiting for a NAK/ACK signal from the other station, and even then it's only when moving larger amounts of data.  It would be a TX of several seconds sounding like a rush of air followed by a short chirp from the other station.  Also, P3 has a number of PSK tones causing a variation of bandwidth.  Moving notches on a screen doesn't sound right.  Only under the best of conditions is the bandwidth 2+ KHz.

I can't tell 100% just by what you wrote, but it doesn't seem like P3 to me.

I also know most of the P2/P3 K-K operators and there has been no chatter about a P3 operation 60 M (we stick to a single center freq on 80, 40, 30, 20, and 15M, with most activity on 20 M.)  Unless it was some ecomm experimenters, I don't know of anyone interested in using P3 on 60 meters.

73
Jeremy N1ZZZ

[KC9SGV]

One of the brand new < 300 baud compliant PSKMail modes maybe ?
Still in Alpha..., but very exciting.
1000's of words/minute...

[K0OD]

Bringing this old thread up to date: WSPR on 60 from the US has shut down.

For one thing, it was being used illegally at the very BOTTOM of a channel probably to stay out of notice. I spotted it on my panadaptor.  Digital and CW on 60 must be at channel-center. Plus the op was running WSPR at 100 Watts! What probably happened was that one idiot started up on WSPR and some others figured it was okay for them too.  60-m WSPR **is** legal in parts of EU.

Never figured out what that "huge mode" was. Haven't heard it again.

Traditionally 60 was a wintertime band; high noise and low power limited its use during the summer. I'm curious to see if the summer brings out more weak signal digital modes. I know that one group has played with JT-65 on the band. 

[W0BTU]

Traditionally 60 was a wintertime band; high noise and low power limited its use during the summer.

Jeff, where is your sense of adventure? Don't you like challenges? 

I don't like QRN any more than you do. But ever since I've been a ham, I've always particularly liked weak-signal work: the challenge of working someone whose signal is nearly buried the noise. That's why I loved DXing on 160 meters and especially on the low end of 144 MHz.

See you on 60 meters again soon (I hope :-)

[KC2RGW]

To the OP, MT-63 2k maybe.

[N4UM]

To the OP, MT-63 2k maybe.

That would be my guess as well.