On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Tim Ellison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ...sit around on the beach with your friends in Aruba steaming oysters and > drinking cold ones by the fire for 24 hours... Actually this is a pretty good opportunity to illustrate the difference between the limited Cognitive Radio and the full-up one. With the Big Bertha, bells-and-whistles version, the radio will *also* send a text message informing the local liquor store when you're running low on cold ones, and best of all, order up champagne when you've completed the Sweep. All the limited Cognitive Radio can do is change bands by itself occasionally :-) To be a little on the serious side, though, I think the contesters who are so up-in-arms are completely blind to the main trend. What the technology does is kick up by dozens of notches the nature of the interaction by contesters. Very few hams are going to have much interest long-term in sitting back, drinking cold ones during a pointless exchange of QSOs, year after year. *However*. Suppose what the cognitive technology does is increase the rate of speed and breadth of the battlefield, so to speak. Suppose what the technology does is make all the bands a panoramic playing board where you can see and track, moment by moment, everything that your competition is doing? Suppose contesting weren't just a stay-in-the-chair, keep-up-the-QSO-rate exercise, but could become a moment-to-moment, multiplayer, station-against-station game? In short, the C/SDR technology is perfectly capable of turning a contest from a long, solitary slog against attritition, to an action game with hundreds if not thousands of players. That might be a frightening prospect to some contesters too, but you can't say it's draining the interest out of the sport :-) 73 Frank AB2KT -- Travelling by airplane in the US is nothing more than mass training of Americans to the requirements of the coming police state. The whole point is to make you learn to acquiesce without question, en masse, to completely absurd directives by dull functionaries wearing uniforms. -- Digby _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
