You know, of course, that once again this year, you're not going to win the
annual running of the Poisson d'Avril, Phone Skimmer or no Phone Skimmer.
73, ron w3wn
On 04/01/15, Pete Smith N4ZR wrote:
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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