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.
I think there have been significant changes in ham radio every decade of it’s existence. That makes the next version 12.0 !
J65 and friends is open source. Since the wsjt 1.7 release there is no more closed source library in the program.
I think digital voice on hf might become big. I think rowetel.com is doing some fascinating development.
Check out this blog post Dan about alexia and ham radio:
http://ag1le.blogspot.com/2017/01/amazon-echo-alexa-skills-for-ham-radio.html?m=1
Jason, Ham Radio 2.0 is the next generation ham. A DMR Repeater in the back yard, head over heals in love with DMR, that says it all??
I will stay at 1.0 for a while.
Ed KC8SBV
Bravo … can’t wait to hear some of your suggestions from the community. I was thinking it would be nice to know when a DX Cluster finds someone on your watch list that is online now with CW. Just ask Echo to do that of course. It would just be nice to have the list be built for you verbally. Or better just have Echo do QRZ look-ups for you and give the location of the Call sign verbally with the distance between you and him and bring up the web page on your browser.
Cognitive radio has been around for a while, but it has been the exclusive plaything of various government services. The FCC keeps thinking about making things like GNU Radio, which is an enabler, somehow ‘licensed’. Various commercial radio and television/satellite interests want to keep a lid on cognitive radio technologies, so they can continue to field weak (i.e. easily broken) digital rights management systems.
FAIK, this is already available, but for mynext generation ham radio, I’d like to see an SDR QRP rig that uses Blue Tooth LE(cell phone or tablet) for display and control.
Affordable 10m-70cm @ 5W/50W w/ tnc over usb – android would be nice so people can create 3rd party apps.