Hey! Hey! Listen up guys!

 

When I started this string my intention was not to be disparaging about my fellow amateurs.

 

My purpose was (perhaps with a little tongue in cheek) to stir up a discussion.

 

My basic thesis was that we should not make assumptions about where technology may or may not take us.

 

As some of you will know, I've been around for a few years now (born 1943) and since being knee-high to the lower half of a piece of coke and a bit of silver wire and tuning coils wound on varnished bog-roll, have watched the most incredible evolution of communications technology. I have been extremely fortunate also to have played a small part in that process - particularly in the regulatory aspects.

 

Not to allow our imaginings to accept that there will come a time when machine intelligence will far surpass today's meagre achievements is tantamount to being part of the same historical (hysterical) movements which, during the industrial revolution, were unable to accept the coming of the machine age in manufacturing!

 

To simply deny the possibility that a very basic modulation encoding (which morse technology surely is) can be enhanced by the evolution of machine intelligence (by whatever name you choose to call it) is also to deny that the various techniques that have evolved to extract extremely weak signal modes are invalid.

 

And, Roman, as a young kid playing with "radio" one of my first "transmitters" did not use valves (tubes) but consisted of a keyed "buzzer" connected to a length of wire salvaged from an old transformer and received a couple of fields away on a friend's father's portable 3-valve TRF portable (45volt HT Dry Battery and 2Volt accumulator - "Picnic" set by either Ever ready or Vidor or similar).

 

I suspect that where Mal and I have common ground is at the very basic level. When many of us were starting out in amateur radio, a knowledge of "morse" was a requirement for a full licence. Some of us discovered subsequently that, rather than being a "chore" or stumbling stone, this knowledge gave us a most amazing tool, being both a means of intelligently modulating a carrier and an "esperanto-of-the-air" international language. Furthermore, we also earned the respect of professional communicators who also used this technique.

 

And if you want a very basic example of how useful I believe this skill might be, try this: My family have been instructed, that should I suffer some incapacitating illness that appears to deprive me of speech they should try using the morse code in various audible, tactile and visual forms!

And in case anyone out there thinks I am talking through my hat, I should remark that I do have a very, very close relationship to someone who has suffered a mild stroke in recent years.

 

Anyway, that's my rant for this chilly saturday evening on the East Coast of England.

 

 

Except for: In the film "2001 A Space Odyssey" why was not HAL programmed to revert to morse as they disconnected his speech circuits?

 

I guess that the answer to that one will be found when they discover which singularity gave rise to the "Big Bang" !!!