>Hi Brian, it was nice to work you again in WPX RTTY and I hope you are
>making decent profits with your ham software offerings. I am interested in
>"native signal processing" routines for fast Fourier transform as I intend
>to continue my DSP CW work previously based on TMS320C25. I wonder if you
>can offer me any help?
>
>73 & CU WRTC-96 in SF de Mario, S56A, N1YU.
Hello Mario. I believe I read something about your CW decoder in the NCJ
some time ago. Last year I wrote one myself for the PC. It was to be a TSR
you loaded before running CT. You pipe receive audio to it via your sound
card. The program would listen to a CW pileup, pull out multiple callsigns,
and display them in a little pop-up window on the CT screen. The idea was
to recover weak callers (multipliers!) that were aurally masked by louder
signals.
I got part of the system running (the FFT that generated parallel CW streams
and the correlator that decoded them). Technically it was great fun,
especially the correlator (I didn't bother to decode dots and dashes--I went
after whole characters). But after I got the basic algorithm working and
printing pileup callsigns on my screen, I realized that I would not want to
use this device in a contest myself! I love CW and I love digging calls out
of pileups. To me, that's a big part of the fun of operating. My decoder
wasn't perfect but it certainly would increase your score. Therefore, a
serious competitor would feel compelled to use one whether he wanted to or
not, whether it made the contest more fun for him or not. I thought this
was an awful position to put someone in.
Logging programs make contesting more fun by eliminating the tedious work.
They free you for the enjoyable parts--like digging callsigns out of
pileups! For me, automatic CW detection steps across the line and takes some
of the essential fun away. It's like hiring someone to have sex for
you--sure, it saves time and gets the job done, but is that what you really
want?
I think it might be fun some day to have a contest pitting program against
program (like computer chess matches). In fact, I'm sure this is coming.
It might also be fun to have a variant of SOA that involves what amounts to
artificial intelligence. But for me, there's definitely a point where I
want the machinery to stop.
My product was going to be called PileUp Buster 1.0. Maybe some day I'll
resurrect it. After some soul searching, I decided to take the technology
and apply it to RTTY where human decoding wasn't involved and it wouldn't
take away any fun.
73--Brian, K6STI
k6sti@n2.net
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