Amazon EchoAmazon EchoIn a recent episode of Ham Radio Now, Gary, KN4AQ, chides Jason, KC5HWB, of Ham Radio 2.0, about the name of his podcast. Gary thinks that we’re up to at least version 4.0 by now. (I don’t remember the exact episode. Maybe Gary can comment on this.)
Whatever the next version number really is, things certainly are changing. Recently, for example, someone commented on my Twitter feed, that he was seeing lots of digital activity on 20m, but little or no SSB or CW activity. That’s certainly to be expected in the future. For whatever reason, new hams—both young and old—don’t seem to be ragchewers. (Coincidentally, or maybe not, it’s odd that the next generation of ham radio will have such a big social media, i.e. Twitter, component.)
I’m just going to throw out some ideas here, and then hopefully, get some ideas back from you:
- Voice control. I’ve become enamored with my Amazon Echo. I listen to radio stations on it, I ask for spellings of words, and I’d play music on it if I’d popped for the more expensive version with better speakers. It’s pretty amazing technology. What I’d like to do is develop a box that would allow me to control my HF rig. I want to be able to say, “Alexa: Set IC-7300 to 7.o27 MHz, CW mode,” and have that happen.
- Artifical intelligence. Amazon is, I’m sure, using artificial intelligence techniques to do speech recognition. Can the use of AI to demodulate signals be far behind? Not only that, I’d guess that AI could be used to select an appropriate frequency/channel/mode in the first place.
- JT9, JT65. I’d like to see an extension of these modes to allow some real communication. I don’t see why this isn’t possible, except, I guess, that this code isn’t open source. Is anyone working on an open source version? Are any extensions being considered?
Well, that’s all for now. I gotta go work some CW on 40m. Let me know what you think.