The following is a list of the modes of radio communication used in the amateur radio hobby.
Amateurs use a variety of voice, text, image, and data communications modes over radio. Generally new modes can be tested in the amateur radio service, although national regulations may require disclosure of a new mode to permit radio licensing authorities to monitor the transmissions. Encryption, for example, is not generally permitted in the Amateur Radio service except for the special purpose of satellite vehicle control uplinks. The following is a partial list of the modes of communication used, where the mode includes both modulation types and operating protocols.
Morse code is called the original digital mode. Radio telegraphy, designed for machine-to-machine communication is the direct on / off keying of a continuous wave carrier by Morse code symbols, often called amplitude-shift keying or ASK, may be considered to be an amplitude modulated mode of communications, and is rightfully considered the first digital data mode. Although more than 140 years old, bandwidth-efficient Morse code, originally developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the 1840s, uses techniques that were not more fully understood until much later under the modern terms of source coding or data compression.
Alfred Vail intuitively understood efficient code design: The bandwidth-efficiency of Morse code arises because its encodings are variable length, and Vail assigned the shortest encodings to the most-used symbols, and the longest encodings to the least-used symbols. It was not until one hundred years later that Shannon's modern information theory (1948) described Vail's coding technique for Morse code, giving it a firm footing in a mathematically based theory. Shannon's information theory resulted in similarly efficient data encoding technologies which use bandwidth like Morse code, such as the modern Huffman, Arithmetic, and Lempel-Ziv codes.
Although commercial telegraphy ended in the late 20th century, Morse code remains in use by amateur radio operators. Operators may either key the code manually using a telegraph key and decode by ear, or they may use computers to send and receive the code.
Decades after the advent of digital amplitude-shift keying (ASK) of radio carriers by Morse symbols, radio technology evolved several methods of analog modulating radio carriers such as: amplitude, frequency and phase modulation by analog waveforms. The first such analog modulating waveforms applied to radio carriers were human voice signals picked up by microphone sensors and applied to the carrier waveforms. The resulting analog voice modes are known today as:
Digital voice modes encode speech into a data stream before transmitting it.
Used primarily in commercial 2-way (particularly railroads). Equipment is available from multiple manufacturers. NXDN uses FDMA with bandwidths of 6.25 kHz common.
Image modes consist of sending either video or still images.
Most amateur digital modes are transmitted by inserting audio into the microphone input of a radio and using an analog scheme, such as amplitude modulation (AM), frequency modulation (FM), or single-sideband modulation (SSB).
Certain procedural activities in amateur radio are also commonly referred to as 'modes', even though no one specific modulation scheme is used.