Good April 1st joke!
73 Yuri VE3DZ
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pete Smith N4ZR" <n4zr@contesting.com>
To: "CQ Contest" <cq-contest@contesting.com>
Sent: 01 April, 2015 06:04
Subject: [CQ-Contest] Contesting Technology - Phone Skimmer Nears Beta Test
To CQ Contest: This press release appeared in PY1NB’s mailbox a few days
ago.The original was written in Esperanto, presumably to disguise the
national origin of those involved, but we have managed to get it
translated, and believe that the news it transmits is too important not to
pass it on.
73
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 1, 2015 Teresopolis, Brazil
_Phone Skimmer in Alpha Test_
Thanks to an anonymous NSA computer scientist who is presumed to be a
radio amateur, working computer code for a Phone Skimmer has been made
available to a clandestine development team, and will be released for beta
test to the amateur radio community in coming months.It promises to bring
to phone contesting and DXing the same incredible capabilities that VE3NEA’s
CW and RTTY Skimmers have brought to those modes.
It was long thought that the decoding problems posed by human speech, even
with the limited vocabulary employed by radio amateurs, rendered a
workable automated system beyond the reach of anyone but the NSA and their
competitors in the shadowy world of signals intelligence.Fortunately,as
predicted by Moore’s Law, recent developments in microprocessor
architecture such as Intel’s new Skylake series have made it possible to
move voice recognition and decoding from a massively-parallel-processor
environment to a relatively straightforward 32-core CPU.The development
team believes that within a few months PCs running these CPUs under
Windows 10 will be able to begin serious beta testing.
Lest readers question whether the new Phone Skimmer is just more
vaporware, the development team has been using alpha test versions of the
software since last fall’s CQWW SSB contest.While the testers are not yet
ready to disclose their identities, the emergence of some new calls in the
top ranks of phone contesting since then demonstrates the impact it can
have.
At the same time, the developers wish to emphasize the challenges that
remain before the phone Skimmer can reach full potential.Testing against
phonetics in different languages, as well as English phonetics when
pronounced by non-native speakers, has brought out some of the hardest
issues.High accuracy in copying the International phonetics Juliet, Kilo,
Lima, Romeo and Golf, for example, will probably depend on rapid lookup in
Super Check Partial files and online licensing databases to help
accuracy,Similarly, numbers like Five and Nine pose special challenges,
and may lead to initiatives to do away with signal reports altogether in
contests.
The development team has asked me to represent them in the media, to spare
them the bombardment of e-mails from radio amateurs from Ireland to
California to Thailand, so they can get the product ready for beta release
as soon as possible.Please bear with us as, once again, technology moves
forward!
73,
Larson E. Rapp, WIOU
Ludditeville, WV
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