Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all who have stopped by and visited the blog. 

Olivia is the digital communications mode on shortwave (high frequency sub band, or, HF) for amateur radio operators who want more than the “Check Propagation” FT8 mode. This video is an introduction that was presented to the Raleigh Amateur Radio Society ( https://www.rars.org/ ) on December 12, 2023, presented by Tomas Hood, NW7US

Olivia information can be found, here:
https://OliviaDigitalMode.org

Olivia, a Multi-Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK) radioteletype digital mode, is an amateur radioteletype protocol designed to work in difficult (low signal-to-noise ratio plus multipath) propagation conditions on shortwave radio (i.e., high-frequency, or HF) bands. The typical Olivia signal is decoded when the amplitude of the noise is over ten times that of the digital signal! It is commonly used by amateur radio operators to reliably transmit ASCII characters over noisy channels (slices of high-frequency spectrum — i.e., frequencies from 3 MHz to 30 MHz; HF) exhibiting significant fading and propagation phasing.

The Olivia digital modes are commonly referred to by the number of tones and the bandwidth used (in Hz). Therefore, it is common to express the Olivia digital mode as Olivia X/Y (or, alternatively, Olivia Y/X ), where X refers to the number of different audio tones transmitted, and Y refers to the bandwidth in Hertz over which these signals are spread. Examples of common Olivia modes are, 8/250 (meaning, 8 tones/250-Hertz bandwidth), 16/500, and, 32/1000.

The protocol was developed at the end of 2003 by Pawel Jalocha. The first on-the-air tests were performed by two radio amateurs, Fred OH/DK4ZC and Les VK2DSG, on the Europe-Australia propagation path in the 20-meter shortwave radio amateur band. The tests proved that the Olivia protocol (or, digital mode) works well and can allow regular intercontinental radio contacts with as little as one-watt RF power (when propagation is highly-favorable). Since 2005, Olivia has become a standard for digital data transfer under white noise, fading and multipath, flutter (polar path) and auroral conditions.

Olivia can perform nearly as good as the very popular WSJT mode, FT8, and better than FT4.

See you on the waterfall!

73 de NW7US

 The weather here for the weekend was not too great so why not spend some time on the radio? I found the Croatian 9A DX contest to take part in. The solar forecast was not promising but I thought why not spend a few hours on the radio on Saturday and see what happens? Turns out the contest was busy and I managed to practice my CW contesting.  

Below are the results:

Hello and welcome to the 526th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, the hosts discuss symbol rate restrictions, new extra class pool questions, ffmpeg, OpenBao, GridTracker and much more. Thanks for turning in and have a great week.

73 de The LHS Crew

In this episode, we join Martin Butler M1MRB, Chris Howard (M0TCH), Martin Rothwell (M0SGL), Frank Howell (K4FMH), Bill Barnes (WC3B) and Leslie Butterfields (G0CIB) to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin Butler (M6BOY) rounds up the news in brief and the episode's feature is Quansheng UV-K5 SDR

We would like to thank an our monthly and annual subscription donors for keeping the podcast advert free. To donate, please visit - http://www.icqpodcast.com/donate

• Ofcom Amateur Radio Consultation Statement
• WRC-23: Week-3 Update – 23cm and WPT
• ARRL RF Safety Committee Develops New Guidelines to Communicate RF Safety
• HAMSCI Releases First Solar Eclipse Findings
• ‘First light’: NASA receives laser-beamed message from 10 million miles away
• New Amateur Extra-Class Question Pool Released
• Proposal Submitted to ESA for Geostationary Microwave Amateur Payload

AmateurLogic.TV Episode 188 is now available for download.

AmateurLogic’s Annual Christmas Extravaganza. Tommy upgrades his N5BOC Hotspot with a new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and it’s fast. Emile updates his hotspot with the WPSD Project. ALTV’s 2023 Gift Guide for last minute shoppers and slackers. Sampling the tastes of the holidays.

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