Videos of VOA Radiogram, 29-30 March 2014, "battle of the 100-wpm modes."

VOA Radiogram during the weekend of March 29 and 30 included a “battle of the 100-word-per-minute modes.” The modes were PSKR125, MT63-1000L, Thor25x4, and MFSK32. Videos kindly provided by three VOA Radiogram listeners demonstrate the comparative performance of the modes.

TW in Japan provided this video of the beginning of the broadcast Saturday at 0930 UTC on 5745 kHz. Because of the challenging transmission path from North Carolina to Japan, even the MFSK32 text was not 100%. The PSKR125 that followed was mostly unusable:
 
youtu.be/jl1SKcfZXAY

Tim in Colorado provides this YouTube video of the entire broadcast Saturday at 1600-1630 UTC, along with some of his commentary typed in the Fldigi transmit pane.  This is a good example of the decoding of the four modes under fair – meaning not great but not too bad – shortwave reception conditions. At 22 minutes into the video, Time declares “DA WINNER” of the battle of the 100-wpm modes.

youtu.be/-VqIXc9SEXw

Nicolas  in Colombia produced this video of his reception Sunday at 0230 UTC (Saturday evening local tme) on 5745 kHz. It demonstrates the decoding of VOA Radiogram modes under even more challenging conditions, and using a relatively  inexpensive shortwave portable with an analog dial. It appears that Nicolas edited out his mostly unsuccessful decode of MT63-1000L. Thor25x4 was more successful with only a few errors. Nicolas’s decode of MFSK32 had some errors, as shown in the video, but my decode of MFSK32 using audio from his video was error-free:

youtu.be/H2-o4y_fkhQ

Here is a screenshot from Nicolas’s video…