My wife Sandy says that what's called AI is proving useful in science, but allows the term itself may be a stretch. I say there's no AI in this box, but there's definitely machine learning going on ... by me, that is, not it.

You may have landed here from my QRZ.com page. If so, you still have a chance to pull the plug! ;-)

Hey folks, this is a consumer-grade server on DreamHost.com. You don't get Google.com speed for that money.

To help offset, there will be some respect for EC101 - an economy of words. Until, of course, there isn't. hi hi!

 

 

Ham radio is evolving. Sure, there are entrenched interests. Contesters and Big Gun DX'ers. But also generational turnover. All those 'OTA's (SOTA particularly going strong), and a renewed QRP, even QRPp, gang out there having, while not quite a blast ERP-wise, a really good time.

And the Sun comes around again here in Cycle 25. It's been good.

There are sounders and dark radars racing across our HF bands. Even a mystery carrier with ultra-narrowband modulation of some sort sitting right on 7.000.000 MHz every evening and morning, denying us that last 100 Hz! (No, it's not the High Frequency Trader gang who'd like to move in a few 100's of kHz down from there.)

But there's also lightnesses of being, such as the FCC's (13 Nov 2023) redefinition of allowable ham digital signals, now under a much more useful limit of 2.8kHz signal occupancy (in HF Data subbands) instead of that 300 baud! Here come the experimenters for sure!

Rip van Wireless from 1994, let alone 1964 when I swung my first bug, would find today's hobby transformed. What will it look like 30 years on? AI in there? Could we even imagine 60 on? Who cares! Dive in! The water's fine.

 

 

Marco would've loved this, spoofing the hobby's cosmic center.

 

Ah, radio. Everyone (and I mean at least hundreds of QRZ'ers) cites Albert Einstein, worth another here:

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way; you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

 

Yes, no cat! But something of which Einstein was famously skeptical. Newton had it basically right ... action-reaction - a quarter millennium before the quantum. You simply can't get something for nothing! You can quote me on that.

 

 

OK, so not all that frequently asked.

QTH: Tucson, AZ's Catalina Mountains' foothills, Grid DM42ng58, 2,600' el, Pima County, Zones: CQ 3, ITU 6.

Station: An FTDX10 to a stealth 40m "fundamental" OCF at 21'. Yep, pretty low.

Antennas are my homebrew interests at present. But isn't signal theory glorious!

Way Back Machine: Long ago, I was an engineer in the days before we, or really anyone, cared a darn about AI.

Way Ahead Machine: Once a community, dues paying member, I've retired to mere "friend" of UofA's club, K7UAZ. For a couple years I "VE'ed" on K7RST's VEC minting new hams or upgrades every month. Looking for even more satisfaction in ham radio? Get into VE'ing. Another great way to help get new ops on the air is to join a club. But ultimately, as far as I'm concerned, On The Air is what counts!

 

 

Continuous wave? Carrier wave? Some thoughts.

THE ORIGINAL ham radio.

I'll be daring: CW is the most mindful mode. Just Zen. The sound of one hand clapping.

 

 

Here you go, single sideband in one (complex-valued) multiplication!

Then you transmit the Real-valued part of the product, s(t). What goes out is a real signal!

LSB for that negative sign in audio. Change that sign to positive, and you have USB. That simple.

Many smart folks find this ridiculous, until thinking about it. Recall the double balanced mixer, you'll see it right off! A more expansive description lies at a bit of tech talk and history.

"Single Sideband" was once fightlng words! There was even a brief bad old time called the "SSB Wars."

 

 

Let's face it, almost every modulation in ham radio that's not phone is digital.

Even some phone nowadays, like FreeDV. But few are doing that. Plain vanilla audio SSB rules.

CW?? Well, it's based on alphabets and timing. So even if clock-free, you could still call it a hybrid.

The more clocked, the more digital. Hmmm, given all that DSP in rigs these days ...

By 1974, Curtis keyers were popular, clocked CW via a gate array chip no less! Trending digital. So long ago.

RTTY has been around, using machine timing, since 1922. Digital by synchronous motor and gear teeth.

By 2004, hams were reaching what had been state of the art roughly 30 years earlier. Blurbs offered here.

By 2006. hams were reaching toward channel capacity with pure, clocked digital, in the energy-limited domain. That's the complement of the bandwidth-limited domain where, to sent the fastest data rates, you might need to apply energy 'til the cows come home or the FCC says Stop! Yet, this may be exactly where ham radio is going.

Most everything more recent than 2001 has been, well, digital. Unless you want to call eSSB "new."

 

 

Three ham radio things. As if things always seem to come in three's. Well ...*

1) Always check your TX frequency BEFORE first keying or PTT'ing up. I just spoke up, caution thrown to the wind, myself some time ago! Uh oh, oh no!** With few exceptions, being in a hurry is often if not usually a bad thing, especially when you are merely just sitting there, and not just in ham radio.***

2) Neither law nor reg, W9EEA's 1928 Amateur's Code is worthy. Then or now, it boils down, IMO, to "Be ...

CONSIDERATE ... never knowingly operating in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others.

FRIENDLY ... with slow and patient operation when requested, friendly advice and counsel to the beginner, kindly assistance, co-operation and consideration for the interests of others. These are the hallmarks of the amateur spirit."

3) Consider joining ARRL. There will be groans. But ARRL is our loudest voice, our broadest point of presence. Yes, endless debate. But in short, it's spectrum. Everyone wants it. The better organized get it.

 

These three things are closely related!

 

* My theory on three's is just this: it gets hard fast to find reasonably independent coincidences in time beyond three. You can frequently get three things (of any sort) in short order, i.e. in a short time t, at small lambda (lambda being the average rate over the long term). See the Poisson distribution for n events in t, relative to n -1 for small average rates, e.g. lambdas between 1 and 4. For those rates, the probability of any 2 isolated, like-kind events in t is actually less than the probability of 3 of them! Very surprising! But more than 3 events occurring in t gets less and less likely fast, which leads inexorably - via limited attention span and availability bias - to that old saw about three's.

** Modern rigs with SPLIT can at least scare you, and how! It's good practice with any rig to always shut it down in a simple state, i.e. SPLIT OFF, VFO A = VFO B for good measure, and MODE legal. Some modern rigs will protect you in software from transmitting phone on a SPLIT CW subband - if you selected CW there in the first place!

*** Corollary: sit on a complex email a while before sending it, maybe a day if really complex; and best, read it again. But do be in a hurry to get off the tracks when you see a locomotive barreling at you, etc. - and yes, I know you may be sitting there in your car, but not merely. These two situations illustrate the dichotomy in Thinking, Fast and Slow, a 2013 Times Best Seller by Nobel Prize winner Danny Kahneman. The slow lane is not always the wrong lane! (Anyone who's driven an LA freeway knows this.) And while those two ways of thinking seem a fine example of things always coming in two's, it ain't so! There's that three things thing* again ...

 

 

Possibly the only actually useful things on a website. Here are a few I've found useful.

 

 

Obliterating EC101 and with a tip of the hat to Dave Brubeck, take a break from ham radio to rethink a formidable competitor to AI, the human brain and its many massive networks - meaning the ones inside your head, not to mention the ones connecting inside to outside and vice versa! What incredible things you can do with 128 billion* interconnected neurons. Think beyond sextillions of useful network paths. AI is only reaching quintillions, and that is a stretch. And that's a very conservative take.

I ask, could a generative AI have come up with the theory of social reality (before its publication)? Ha! Consider the propositions of a research psychologist/neuroscientist who wrote a short, readable book on the subject of us. Not a freebee, but probably nearly so on your local (virtual) library shelf. Check it out, and support your public library!

You might also check out this more interactive take on the same theme of literally creating reality.

There will soon be boku books of varying readability (let alone intelligibility), on the nature and creation of reality authored by large language models on deep convolutional neural nets with self-supervised learning algorithms running amok across the web, as if in search for the meaning of meaning. And they will all be for free! Sort of.

Remember, you get what you pay for.

Back to ham radio, a formidable contester I know of suggested that AI would make a great helper in that radiosport. The AI would handle everything, excepting only the op to acknowlege the contact (using his voice, key or keyboard) and to permit a log entry (handled by AI, of course}, to claim the points. The op needn't otherwise do much else but select a band to work and sip coffee, or tea like that competitor I know does**, as the points roll in. No way! We ought insist on an express rule of sportsmanship in contesting - no "participating" AI's allowed in the shack! Until, I suppose, the FCC decides to license one of them as a radio amateur in its own right. Now that's a chilling thought.

Yes, there is a slight analogy with getting DXCC on FT8.

Now a blog. Maybe skip, of course!

For a "view from the top" of the future of AI, check out Profile and Brave New World Dept. takes from The New Yorker on the "godfather" of modern AI and the founder of Nvidia. As far as the "upbringing" of these silicon creatures goes, they need to embrace Tim Berners-Lee as their University librarian, who has apparently, perhaps sadly, thrown in the towel(?) and transitioned to the project for a web within widget, that widget being AI. And for all their prodigious speed, and I'll give them that. Yet AI are only linked repositories of recorded human knowledge and belief, prompted to a path by the "predict next word" algorithm, and nothing else (that anyone, even "in the know" can explain comprehensibly to you). Yes, with only such "black box" logic you can get something that resembles a novel on any subject. Or junk in the case of "hallucination," better called "confabulation" as Geoffrey Hinton does. Forget feeling, creativity, serendipity, not to mention exploring, experimenting, encountering... all the amazing things a human being can and does do, with a mind and body.

Add robots? Now there's another chilling thought.

 

* You will encounter a "count" of human brain neurons as being some 85 billion. But this omits the critical presence of an additional 43 billion tightly embedded support cells, glials etc., that literally help shape and reshape a continuously evolving network to produce, in the end, what's popularly called mind.

 

** That competitor in fact today does virtually all of his own work, using only a keyer memory for the standard CW spurts, like QRZ DE (call sign), etc. I hope he was joking about employing an AI assistant!

 

 

Are the 70's too old? In this, now ancient edition of Etc., here's a reply for that major plurality of hams:

Depends. Paul Newman helped win, as co-driver in the GTS-1 Class, the 1995 edition of 24 Hours of Daytona at 70, becoming the oldest winning driver of a major car race in history. Newman's Ford Mustang came within six laps, out of 690, of the 1st Place, top Class Le Mans style car, and 3rd overall. Not bad for an old fart on a pony.

 

 

 

 

 

Re: Einstein on radio: Have you noticed the scent of an aether on that cat?

 

 

73, and may your world be ever e x p a n d i n g . .

 

 

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