Wide AF SSB Radio for Digital

Doing digital over SSB HF is pretty nifty. Your computer essentially processes several channels of data at once, and allows you to monitor several QSOs. When you transmit, even though the radio is capable of transmitting a 2.5khz wide signal you only send a few hertz, allowing you to drop in your signal inbetween everyone else's.

In many ways, it's a software defined radio -- the real radio is just dropping a 2.5khz wide band of HF down to audio frequencies to make it easy for the computer to deal with.

But 2.5khz isn't really optimal for digital, it's optimal for voice. And as far as making do with existing technology, it's great.

But why not build a digital-oriented, low cost (!), SSB transceiver that passes through 10khz of bandwidth instead of 2.5? It would be useless for voice, for sure, but since sound cards can digitize at 44khz they'd have no problem with 10khz of spectrum all at once. Even 5khz of AF bandwidth would be twice as useful!