Coming soon to a repeater near you …
You may have noticed a new trend in the local repeaters, with the introduction of artificial intelligence. Now instead of dropping occasional random words out of a QSO those repeaters with smartALEC (Artificial Linear Electronic Clumsiness) technology are getting better at only dropping out key words from sentences, so instead of hearing “I hdfksfbe arriving in twenty minutes” the upgraded repeater now transmits “I should be arriving in hdfksf minutes”, or “lets QSY to hdtalfksfb” instead of letting an actual frequency slip through. This is not a bug. Instead the feature is designed to prolong contacts, ensuring the repeaters, and the frequencies they occupy, are active for more hours of the day. After all, if operators only have to say everything once, there will be even more dead air and wasted spectrum.
There are rules about deliberately obscuring the meaning of a transmission, so there are limits to what this technology can legally achieve. It may turn out that it will have to repeat as well as retransmit parts of each transmission to keep the average number of hours of repeater use up. It could sound like “I should be arriving in hdfksf minutes hdfksf minutes minutes”. Perhaps it will just default to adding “very bests” to every “seventy three” it hears, or inserting everyone’s call in a round table on EVERY transmission. That should keep the repeaters active 24/7, if not 25/8.
When this technology becomes integrated into HF transceivers, the art of the QSO, to say nothing about contesting, will become more of a challenge. NEWDSP (Non Extreme Wooly Digital Signal Perturbation) will allow automatic control of both the AGC (Aggrivating Gizmo Control) on the receive side and ALC (Automatic Level Corruption) on the transmit side. Together these two systems will ensure the QSO attempt takes place at (or below) the “minimum power necessary for the desired communication” by ensuring that it is always the same letter of the other person’s callsign that gets lost, rather than just a random one as is the present case. Fortunately, this development is unlikely to be ready for widespread deployment in new commercial rigs until the bottom of the current solar cycle.
For more (and better) April Foolery, check out https://ve7nfr.com/thedipole.html . Those guys have a blog they call The DIPOLE, claiming in the masthead “The Worlds Finest Amateur Radio News Source. Like a Dipole there are two sides to every story. We ignore those sides, digging deeper for unwanted lobes and parasitic reactions.”
They don’t even wait for April to get into the act.
Best seventy threeses,
mk VE3FFK
Last Updated on 2024-12-23 by AdminOARC