The institute for Posts and Telecommunications Policy (IPTP) held its first character recognition competition in 1992 to ascertain the present status on ongoing research in character recognition and to find promising algorithms for handwritten numerals. The authors report the results of this competition and attempt to analyze substituted or rejected patterns in an effort to demonstrate the limitations of the present recognition technology and to clarify the remaining problems. They ascertain that by combining the complementary characteristics of each into a recognition system, the recognition ability is assumed to be remarkedly improved. Furthermore, they discuss a variety of combination rules for the multiexpert system and present promising results.>

Digital transmission over the empty lower baseband of an existing microwave radio system has the advantages of economical and easy construction. A 1.544 Mbit/s PCM-FDM converter (PF-B1) has been developed. Field test results show that the error-rate per bit is less than 10-8over 840 km with 3 basebands.