That's how we pass our position reports to the controllers when we are out of radar range, which is quite a bit of the time, over water or in the third world. We have to give them our time over a waypoint, the estimated time to the next waypoint, and the following waypoint, our altitude, fuel, winds, etc.
I prefer Sat com, but not every place on the planet has Sat Com installed in their Air Traffic Control centers. Most of the third world does not have it, that's where we typically use HF, because we are out of VHF range once out over the water more than about 150-200 miles from a VHF tower.
Here's the thing about HF though, it is TERRIBLE. The quality of the reception is very bad, most of the time. And it is affected by solar storms, even thunder storms will wash out the transmissions sometimes.
Then you have the language barriers, when you are trying to hear the Chinese or Russians or Africans, who are trying to speak English but do it very poorly.
We have been bitching about still using HF, a WW2 technology, in this century for many years, when Satellite Com is available and it is much clearer.
We also have a thing called CPDLC (Controller/Pilot Data Link Com) which also uses satellites, that we use over Canada, Iceland and parts of Western Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. With CPDLC, we don't even have to talk on the radio, we just type a message to the controller (we call it E Mail) and they can message us back, no radio calls needed.
BUT...as I said a long while back, it's a Money thing. A lot of the third world doesn't have Sat Com or CPDLC because they can't (or won't) pay for it. It's also a "Jobs" thing. As with Gander, Iceland and Ireland, we still use HF to back up the VHF and CPDLC.
Why? Because if they got rid of HF, they'd have to lay off a lot of HF operators.
