My wife Sandy says that what's called AI is proving useful in science, but allows the term itself may be a stretch. I say there's no AI in this box, but there's definitely machine learning going on ... by me, that is, not it.

Hey folks, this is a consumer-grade server on DreamHost.com. You don't get Google.com speed for that money.

To help offset, there will be some respect for EC101 - an economy of words. Until, of course, there isn't. hi hi!

Ham radio is evolving. Sure, there are entrenched interests. But also generational turnover. There are sounders and dark radars racing across our HF bands, even high frequency stock traders taking aim at our HF band edges threatening huge signals. But there's also lightnesses of being, such as the FCC's (13 Nov 2023) redefinition of allowable ham digital signals, to a new limit of 2.8kHz signal occupancy (in HF Data subbands) instead of the old 300 baud limit! Here come the experimenters!

Rip van Wireless from 1994, let alone 1964 when I swung my first bug, would find today's hobby transformed. What will it look like 30 years on? Could we even imagine it in another 60? Who cares! Dive in! The water's fine.

Marco would've loved this, spoofing the hobby's cosmic center.

Ah, radio. Everyone cites Albert Einstein:

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way; you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

OK, so not all that frequently asked.

QTH: Tucson, AZ's Catalina Mountains' foothills, Grid DM42ng58, 2,600' el, Pima County, Zones: CQ 3, ITU 6.

Station: An FTDX10 to a stealth 40m "fundamental" OCF at 21'. Yep, pretty low.

Antennas are my homebrew interests at present. But isn't signal theory glorious!

Way Back Machine: I was a EE in the days before we, or really anyone, cared a darn about AI, let alone worried.

Way Forward Machine: I'm a "community member" (meaning too old to bother enrolling) of the University of Arizona's AR club, K7UAZ. I "VE" on K7RST's Laurel VEC, where we mint seven or so new hams or upgrades every month, from Tech to Extra. Looking for even more satisfaction in ham radio? Get into VE'ing or mentoring! A great way to do this is to join a club.

Continuous wave? Carrier wave? Some thoughts.

CW may be the most mindful mode. The sound of one hand clapping.

Here you are, single sideband in one (complex-valued) multiplication!

Then you transmit the Real-valued part of the product, s(t). What goes out is a real signal!

Many smart people find this ridiculous, until thinking about it a bit. If you recall the double balanced mixer, you'll see this right off! A more expansive description lies at a bit of tech talk and history.

"Single Sideband" was once fightlng words! You'll find a brief history at that bit of ... link.

Let's face it, almost every modulation in ham radio that's not phone is digital.

Even some phone nowadays, like FreeDV. But few are doing that. Plain vanilla audio SSB rules.

CW?? Well, it's based on alphabets and timing. So even if clock-free, you could still call it a hybrid.

The more clocked, the more digital. Hmmm, given all that DSP in rigs these days ...

By 1974, Curtis keyers were popular, clocked CW via a gate array chip no less! Mostly digital. So long ago.

And RTTY has been around, using machine timing, since 1922. Digital by synchronous motor and gear teeth.

By 2004, hams were reaching what had been state of the art roughly 30 years earlier. Blurbs offered here.

By 2006. hams were reaching toward channel capacity with pure, clocked digital, this in the energy-limited domain. That's the complement of the bandwidth-limited domain where, to sent the fastest data rates, you might need to apply energy 'til the cows come home or the FCC says Stop! Yet, this may be exactly where ham radio is going.

Most everything more recent than 2001 has been, well, digital. Unless you want to call eSSB "new."

Three ham radio things. As if things always seem come in three's. Well ...*

1) Always check your TX frequency BEFORE first keying or PTT'ing up. I just spoke up, caution thrown to the wind, myself some time ago! Uh oh, oh no!** With few exceptions, being in a hurry is often if not usually a bad thing, especially when you are merely just sitting there, and not just in ham radio.***

2) Neither law nor reg, W9EEA's 1928 Amateur's Code is worthy. Then or now, it boils down, IMO, to "Be ...

CONSIDERATE ... never knowingly operating in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others.

FRIENDLY ... with slow and patient operation when requested, friendly advice and counsel to the beginner, kindly assistance, co-operation and consideration for the interests of others. These are the hallmarks of the amateur spirit."

3) Consider joining ARRL. There will be groans. But ARRL is our loudest voice, our broadest point of presence. Yes, endless debate. But in short, it's spectrum. Everyone wants it. The better organized get it.

These things are all closely related!

* My theory on three's is just this: it gets hard fast to find reasonable independent neighboring coincidences in time beyond three. You can frequently get three things (of any sort) in short order, i.e. in a short time t, at a small lambda (lambda being the average rate over the long term). See the Poisson distribution for n events in t, relative to n -1 for small average rates, e.g. lambdas between 1 and 4. The probability of any 2 isolated events in t is actually less than for 3. Very surprising! But more than 3 events occurring in t gets less and less likely fast, which leads - by recall and a mental phenomenon called availability bias - to that old saw about three's.

** Modern rigs with SPLIT can at least scare you, and how! It's good practice with any rig to always shut it down in a simple state, i.e. SPLIT OFF, VFO A = VFO B for good measure, and MODE legal. Some modern rigs will protect you in software from transmitting phone on a SPLIT CW subband - if you selected CW there in the first place!

*** Corollary: sit on a complex email a while before sending it, maybe a day if really complex; and best, read it again. But do be in a hurry to get off the tracks when you see a locomotive barreling at you, etc. - and yes, I know you may be sitting there in your car, but not merely. These two situations illustrate the dichotomy in Thinking, Fast and Slow, a 2013 Times Best Seller by Novel Prize winner Danny Kahneman. The slow lane is not always the wrong lane! (Anyone who's driven an LA freeway knows this.) And while those two ways of thinking seem a fine example of things always coming in two's, it ain't so! There's that thing* again ...

Possibly the only useful things on a website. Here are a few I've found useful.

With a tip of the hat to Dave Brubeck, take a break from ham radio to rethink a formidable competitor to AI, the human brain and its many massive networks - meaning the ones inside your head, not to mention the ones connecting inside to outside! What incredible things you can do with 128 billion* interconnected neurons.

I ask, could a generative AI come up with the modern theory of social reality? Consider the propositions of a research psychologist/neuroscientist who wrote a short, quite readable book on the subject of us.

Not a freebee, but probably on your local (virtual) library shelf. Check it out!

You might also check out this more interactive take on the same theme of literally creating reality.

There will soon be boku books of varying readability (let alone intelligibility), on the creation of reality authored by large language models on deep convolutional neural nets with self-supervised learning algorithms running amok across the web, as if in search for the meaning of meaning. And they will all be for free! Sort of.

Remember, you get what you pay for.

Back to ham radio, a formidable contest competitor I know suggested that AI would make the ultimate helper in that radiosport. The AI would handle everything except for the op simply acknowledging the contact (using his voice, or key, or keyboard) permitting a log entry (that handled by the AI of course) and the points. The op needn't do much else except select a band to work and sip coffee, or tea as that competitor I know does, as the points roll in. No way! We need to insist on the rule of sportsmanship in contesting - no participating AI's allowed in the shack! Until, I guess, the FCC decides to license them as radio amateurs in their own right. Now that's a chilling thought.

For a "view from the top" of the future of AI, check out this in The New Yorker's Brave New World Dept. As far as the "upbringing" of these new silicon creatures goes, they need embrace Tim Berners-Lee as their godfather. For all their prodigious speed, and I'll give them that, they are only linked repositories of recorded human knowledge and belief, and nothing else. Forget emotion, creativity, serendipity ... the amazing things about a human being.

* You will encounter a "count" of human brain neurons as being some 85 billion. But this omits the critical presence of an additional 43 billion tightly embedded support cells, glials etc., that literally help shape and reshape a continuously evolving network to produce, in the end, what's popularly called mind.

Are the 70's too old? In this edition of Etc., here's a reply for that major plurality of hams:

Depends. Paul Newman helped win, as co-driver in the GTS-1 Class, the 1995 edition of 24 Hours of Daytona at 70, becoming the oldest winning driver of a major car race in history. Newman's Ford Mustang came within six laps, out of 690, of the 1st Place, top Class Le Mans style car, and 3rd overall. Not bad for an old fart on a pony.

Re: Einstein on radio: Have you noticed the scent of an aether on that cat?

73, and may your world be ever e x p a n d i n g . .

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