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...
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