Mixed Modes?

While listening to the local traffic net tonight, I thought about the inefficiency of moving traffic by voice.  I appreciate that if it's all data, it's email, not traffic, but a thought occurred to me ...

What if we had easy support for "mixed mode" radio: where you start out on voice, but when both the sender and receiver are ready, the sender switches to data to squirt a file.  Radiograms are very short, data-wise, and the length of a 1200 baud message would be very short.  With Forward Error Correction (FEC), you wouldn't need a hand-shake protocol; the receiver would look at their software and say either they got it or they didn't, and retries could be coordinated by voice.

I appreciate the value in still doing it all by voice, but I also think that a mixed mode would be useful in a lot of ways beyond just traffic nets...

Chat Roulette and Ham Radio

Imagine a new sensation everyone is talking about.  With this new application, you can connect with and talk to random people all over the world.  You never know who you are going to get to talk to, which is part of the fascination people have with it.

Wow, sounds like Ham Radio! Except it's Chat Roulette, the latest Internet fad...