[CQ-Contest] What's the station?

[Kevin Normoyle]

In thinking about how to design an optimal remote
station, one things about the minimal amount of information
bandwidth that needs to be moved back and forth,
in order to minimize latency.

So then you start thinking about what exactly you're
transferring, and why.

With new digital modes, or even current rtty, a bunch
of processing is done on computers. One could
argue that the computer is part of the transmitter
and the receiver.

Same thing with new digital voice, with software
being done on the computer.

At one extreme, one could imagine designing a receiver that
outputs VOIP directly, instead of audio, for a higher quality
network delivery, with additional computer post-processing
at the remote control point. Like digital modes, you could imagine
rapid innovation with people trying different software
approaches.


I think that's one thing that's missing in the rules.

It's never really been clarified just how much the computer
is part of the station. The idea of what's a transmitter
and what's a  receiver is changing rapidly. To get a better
mental image: imagine you have a transmitter or receiver that's
split into two parts with a very long cable between the parts.
Now imagine that one part actually is just software executing
on a commodity pc.

So it's not just about saying where the human is.

There's this notion of "station equipment" that's clearly
beyond the 500m circle rule. There has to be an agreement
on what's "station equipment". It gets harder as
more and more of "stuff" becomes software. Software that
can be executed locally or remotely, depending on
how you slice up the data.

-kevin
ke6rad