You're talking to a wall. Paul always does this stuff ... if you don't
view ham radio the way he does you aren't doing ham radio.
What Paul is never able to grasp is that "ham radio" covers a much
broader scope than he perceives, and that includes contesting. As long
as contest sponsors are thoughtful enough to properly categorize
activities, I can find no problem at all with there being CW contests,
SSB contests, RTTY contests, FT4 contests, etc. They simply require
different combinations of skills, and having different types of contests
simply serves the broader interests of hams in general. It's still ham
radio.
It's ridiculous and purely arbitrary to assert that the only valid
contests are those where hams do their own decoding (which of course
leaves out the very popular RTTY mode). What about encoding? I would
bet that most contesters today don't send their own information, at
least not on CW and RTTY. We push a button on the keyboard and the
logger does it for us. Why should only one direction of the
communication path need to fit Paul's narrow view? I have literally done
entire major CW contests without ever touching the paddle (and had half
the received callsigns/reports auto-filled for me by the logger to boot).
I wouldn't like to see contests lump fully automated QSOs with
non-automated ones, but the signal processing argument is bogus. The
ability for FT4 to copy weak signals comes at the cost of speed, and I
can list other disparities between stations as well. If I have a rig
with better DSP capabilities I'm going to be able to hear stations
somebody with a lesser rig won't. It's not my proficiency that makes a
difference ... it's PROCESSING that does. If I have narrower filters
than somebody else does I can pick out stations from a pack better than
somebody else could. It's not my proficiency that makes a difference
... it's PROCESSING. FT4 is simply a digital mode with different
processing tradeoffs, and why Paul thinks that the possibilities being
"limitless" is a problem is beyond me.
The DSP found in almost all modern rigs is itself "processing". It
takes the analog signal from the antenna, slices and dices it to bits,
runs it through various software algorithms, transforms it in both time
and frequency domains, and reconstructs it to audio.
And what is so special about audio? It is merely one of our senses.
Sight is also a natural sense, and if some of us (disclaimer ... I've
never done a RTTY contest in my life) prefer to "decode" our received
information visually (i.e., read text) what makes that inferior to
hearing it? Yes, a digital mode has the potential to automatically load
contact information into the log, but what part of typing is a
fundamental ham radio activity (especially since I can accomplish pretty
much the same thing in a CW or SSB contest just by clicking on the
callsign in a band map)? You still have to read to comprehend the QSO.
What makes hearing fundamental to ham radio while seeing isn't?
It's kind of funny in a way ... most humans can listen faster than they
can read. It's not like reading gives you an advantage. Both hearing
and seeing require brain translation to achieve comprehension.
It's up to the contest sponsors to keep entry categories fair and
orderly, but as long as it requires competition of some sort as defined
by the rules (communication proficiency, rig building, antenna design,
choice of band/time, ... whatever) to decide who won and who didn't I
totally don't understand the need to put such narrow boundaries on what
comprises ham radio and what doesn't.
Diversity is healthy.
73,
Dave AB7E
p.s. I can't wait to see what kind of private message Paul will send me
this time.
On 6/3/2019 9:25 AM, Chuck Dietz wrote:
I don’t have any idea what you are saying here. Are you just bad mouthing
digital modes?
Chuck W5PR
On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 6:55 AM Paul O'Kane <pokane@ei5di.com> wrote:
Great - we have yet another data mode. There is no single data mode that
is
"best" in all respects. It's always a compromise between time, signal
rate,
bandwidth and number of discrete channels or tones - the potential
combinations
are limitless.
What all data modes (including RTTY) have in common is that they require
machine decoding. It seems to me that ham-radio contesters do their own
decoding, whether it's CW or Phone. Everything else is data processing
and,
increasingly, fully-automated data processing.
Let's leave data modes to the Data-Processing-over-RF apps.
73,
Paul EI5DI
On 02/06/2019 19:49, Jim Brown wrote:
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [wsjtgroup] WSJT-X 2.1.0-rc6
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2019 14:32:20 -0400
From: Joe Taylor joe@Princeton.EDU [wsjtgroup]
<wsjtgroup-noreply@yahoogroups.com>
Reply-To: Joe Taylor <joe@Princeton.EDU>
To: wsjtgroup@yahoogroups.com <wsjtgroup@yahoogroups.com>
To: Users of WSJT-X -- especially those interested in radio contesting
From: WSJT Development Group
As you know, we have been developing a protocol called FT4 for use in
radio contesting. A new version of FT4 is now available for testing
in WSJT-X 2.1.0-rc6.
PLEASE NOTE THAT FT4 IN RELEASE CANDIDATE 6 IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH
THAT IN ANY PREVIOUS RELEASE.
Therefore: Please stop using WSJT-X 2.1.0-rc5. If you wish to use FT4
after today or to take advantage of other recent program corrections
or enhancements, you should use WSJT-X 2.1.0-rc6.
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