HRN 542: AAQ @ 60 📅

January 11, 1965, Amateur Radio Station WN9NSO made its first, shaky 5 wpm CW… attempt… in the 40 meter Novice band.

60 years later, WN9NSO is now K4AAQ, our East Coast Host. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, as Gary talks about what ham radio was like for that Novice, 60 years ago. No repeaters. No digital (RTTY was it). No computers. Lots of AM.

Gary opened up the Zoom and was joined by Ron K9ID, a friend from the Chicago suburbs and then WN9RPD/WA9RPD, and a newer friend, Jerry KE4TTS. Join us for a trip down memory lane.

HRN 541: 🥊👴AAQ 🤜vs🤛 GPT🤖🥊

Enough emoji in the title?

David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ discuss AI chat engines. Specifically, how Gary bullied chatGPT into correct answers about GMRS channel steps (for the record, it’s 12.5 kHz). Somebody in a Facebook group asked that question, and someone else got the answer from a confident chatGPT, but chat GPT got it wrong (they said 5 kHz). The challenge was ON, and Gary emerged victorious, with chatGPT backing down… a couple of times!

Moving on, David found a newsletter author/podcaster who experimented with AI voices (from NotebookLM) to generate a ‘podcast’ based on his most recent newsletter. The result was interesting. Then Gary found the same robot voices in a show discovering that they weren’t real!

We can retire at any time.

Finally, Gary challenged a discussion from the Ham Radio Crash Course on why repeaters are so quiet… lately. Gary’s point: it ain’t ‘lately’.

HRN 540: O Holy... Grail? 🏆

This week, Jason Johnston KC5HWB of the Ham Radio 2.0 show was reacting to viewer comments that there were Too Many Digital (Voice) Modes. East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ has been preaching on that topic for years, and while his Q-Mobile does have radios for D-STAR, DMR and System Fusion… and so does his belt…. he wouldn’t mind having one rig to rule them all – a 21st Century ‘Multi-Mode’. That’s his Holy Grail 🏆

So Gary invited Jason on the show to talk about it, along with West Coast Host David Goldenberg W0DHG, who has a DMR radio but only uses it for FM 🤔

After thoroughly wringing out that topic (and David signing off to go back to work), they move on to talk about GMRS – how it’s now kind of a gateway to ham radio and a hobby radio service itself (albeit not really intended for that by the FCC).