[CQ-Contest] Merging Social Media and Contesting

[David Gilbert]

On 3/14/2020 6:41 AM, Paul O'Kane wrote:
>
> "The newer digital modes are semi- or fully-automated 
> machine-to-machine modes - my computer processing your computer's 
> data, and vice-versa.  There's clearly as a place for them, but please 
> don't refer to them as ham radio.  FTx takes the ham out of ham radio."

Except that fundamentally FTx is simply an encode/decode system.  It 
doesn't have to be semi-automated or fully automated, and modern signal 
chains aren't human recognizable anyway.   When operating CW or SSB with 
any radio built in the last couple of decades the incoming signal is 
sliced and diced, digitally analyzed, digitally processed with various 
algorythms (filters, noise reduction, etc), and then digitally restored 
to analog.  That digital processing improves SNR to allow better 
readability of signals.  FTx simply an extension of that process .... it 
just  pre-encodes the signal at the transmit end for more effective 
decode processing at the receiving end.  I could literally create a 
tunable narrow band (essentially single signal) version of FTx that has 
the same superior SNR performance of FTx, except that it translated the 
received text to audible CW instead of printing it to the screen.  The 
only difference between that and normal CW in a contest (which is 
already almost always sent via macros) is that there would be a few 
seconds delay (probably less than 5) on the receiving end, the CW would 
be at whatever speed the receiver wanted it to be, the SNR capability 
would be about 10 db better than normal CW, and the CW would be QRM 
free.  To be clear, the digital frame wouldn't even have to be locked to 
a clock cycle ... it could be asynchronous.  FTx as a mode by itself is 
simply modern signal processing.


> "Unlike the FTx machine-to machine modes, all forms of phone are 
> person-to-person - individuals communicating with one another. "

RTTY is also essentially machine-to-machine with visual text, and FTx 
could have been designed almost exactly like RTTY except with much 
better SNR and much better utilization of bandwidth.  Maybe you have a 
gripe against RTTY too, but it is hugely popular for contesting.  FTx 
created a whole new ballgame for DXing and general contacts, but some of 
the features of WSJT-X made it a bit clumsy for contesting and took away 
some of the ability for skill to be a differentiator.  That could be 
addressed.


73,
Dave   AB7E