This!
In addition, spoken language contains a lot of “empty” sections, like pauses.
An interruption of propagation for 200 mS will likely not hamper your ability to reconstruct a spoken transmission. In CW, it most likely means you are loosing three dits or one dah.
Most of the what we attribute to human ability to decipher distorted voice communications can be explained by redundancy, parts with no information entropy (like pauses, “err”, “uhm”) and knowledge about probabilities and correlation between characters and words (and context), or additional information that is not being transmitted (e.g. my operating position vs. likely CEPT prefixes on 2m).
When receiving an SSB transmission of spoken language, we do not require neither the entire spectrum nor the entire duration of the transmission (contrary to the transmission of music or dense digital modes without redundancy for error recovery).
A very obvious example is the phonetic alphabet - it is explicitly designed so that the words for each character are as distinctive as possible, and you only need part of the audio signal to reconstruct it:
Del… .ilo …ree In… tag. …oke ….able
is DK3IT/P even though about half of the transmission time is muted.
If we want a scientifically sound analysis, we would need to set up a “number stations on a summit” competition and read random sequences of numbers in SSB and in CW at controlled power levels or in combination with SNR estimates, ideally without any breaks or pauses.
As for SOTA, a likely very relevant variable is the number and geographic distribution of potential chasers wrt to the mode or modes they operate, and the equipment and antennas they have.
By the way, I do neither want to hijack this thread nor lecture anybody, I am just enjoying the inspiring interaction and food for thought!
To the moderators: I would not object if we were able to split this thread and move the discussion about modes and power ratio into a new one. It might be a useful reference, and we are close to the 100 message limit anyway.
73 de Martin, DK3IT