6 ms·

Building a speech recognition system for amateur radio communication

65 points by petethomas 8y ago

woodson 8y ago
tl;dr: author describes the use of Google cloud STT on ham radio audio recordings
AWildC182 8y ago
For anyone who thinks this is the most cutting edge thing happening in amateur radio, there's some much more interesting development in the fields of SDR and signal propagation. Take a look at FT8/JS8call for instance.
Animats 8y ago
CQ Contest, CQ Contest...
kawfey 8y ago
I tend to agree with the many people that say that ham radio is a dying hobby - both literally because it's practitioners are becoming silent keys by the hundreds a day, and newcomers are in it only to meet the minimum requirements for legally using cheap Chinese handheld radios (if they do so at all) and to use high-power transmitters for drone control and video, or as "preppers," and figuratively in that there are a lot fewer innovations in radio by radio amateurs today than there were several years ago, when the science of radio was primarily in the hands of hobbyists. Now it's in the hands of telecom corporations, academic and research institutions, and the defense industry, meanwhile ham radio is more or less still stuck in a bygone era, slowly coming to the present time through grassroots innovations in software defined radio technologies, the free and open source codec2, extremely robust synchronous digital modulations for shortwave channels, which are slowly starting to be recognized by the mainstream. We don't have the kinds of technologies in a ham radio that we take for granted in our cell phone - yet - and bringing ham radio up to speed really hasn't been a priority of its licensees since a lot of them are members of the aforementioned industries who take pleasure in antiquated pastimes, not unlike maintaining and restoring historic vehicles. Younger people don't have really have a good reason to join, and several are led astray by the large gap in age. I got in it at 15, and since it gave me a lot of technical background, it led me to a career. Now in my 20's, I'm finding less interest in it seeing it's basically a bunch of people exchanging names over the air, and sending proof of that exchange over the internet. A lot of youth cannot fathom why you need the radio when you have the internet already. There are a million more facets to ham radio than that, but it's hard to see the forest through the trees. A lot of the advances in ham radio merely tacks on a previous invention to the face of the service, such as this one. It's pretty cool, nobody has done it before and it might be a worthwhile and noble task to apply it to other forms of radio communication, but it - and other recent innovations - kind of lacks the "wow" factor ham radio needs to resurrect itself from it's path to obsolescence.
- AWildC182 8y ago
  I agree completely. I've also found that the community can be, at times, fairly hostile to the hacker mentality. I've often asked people about trying to get manufacturers to open source their firmware such that it could be modified and improved but I usually just get a line about how "nobody wants to do that so why should they?" or that it's a "waste of their time". The old men seem to only care about playing with shiny new radios but don't seem to care about doing anything interesting with them. I will say though, Travis Goodspeed and his work has been a huge bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape. He's reverse engineered radio firmware, built a ham watch out of a casio calculator watch and an MSP430, and created a ham satellite tracking dish among other things. I really wish we had more people like him. You also mention the preppers... I've come to find that they're basically the only thing keeping the hobby afloat at this point. All of the .22 hoarders keep buying up truckloads Baofengs, Icoms and Yaesus and while some get drawn into it, a lot seem to stick them in the basement and never even bother to get licenced or learn how to use them. There seems to be some internal regret about hitching the hobby to that group but it was all but inevitable given the central nature of EMCOM to the hobby.
  - resters 8y ago
    I suggest you step outside of the "Baofeng vs Yaesu" box and explore HF. There is tons of open source hardware and software stuff going on, and it's growing rapidly. Also see my reply to your comment's parent.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  Some of it is interest in the spectrum and the need for long range bidirectional radio for modern "hacking" interests isn't there, and what you said, that everything is so closed source and locked up by the hardware vendors, that open, cross platform development isn't intuitive. I haven't looked at SDR, though, so I could be off base.
- password4321 8y ago
  Related 3 days ago: Ham vs. Ham as Radio Amateurs Are in Conflict with ARRL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157488 > slr555: Amateur radio may seem like a quaint hobby for old timers but there are a number of newer hybrid operating modes that play nicely with the digital world.
resters 8y ago
On the subject of the linked article, I've been wanting to try something like this with SSB audio to see how well the algorithms can understand it. I could provide a broadband SDR IQ recording of lots of SSB audio if anyone wishes to give it a try.

65 points by petethomas 8y ago

tl;dr: author describes the use of Google cloud STT on ham radio audio recordings

For anyone who thinks this is the most cutting edge thing happening in amateur radio, there's some much more interesting development in the fields of SDR and signal propagation. Take a look at FT8/JS8call for instance.

Animats 8y ago

CQ Contest, CQ Contest...

kawfey 8y ago

I tend to agree with the many people that say that ham radio is a dying hobby - both literally because it's practitioners are becoming silent keys by the hundreds a day, and newcomers are in it only to meet the minimum requirements for legally using cheap Chinese handheld radios (if they do so at all) and to use high-power transmitters for drone control and video, or as "preppers," and figuratively in that there are a lot fewer innovations in radio by radio amateurs today than there were several years ago, when the science of radio was primarily in the hands of hobbyists. Now it's in the hands of telecom corporations, academic and research institutions, and the defense industry, meanwhile ham radio is more or less still stuck in a bygone era, slowly coming to the present time through grassroots innovations in software defined radio technologies, the free and open source codec2, extremely robust synchronous digital modulations for shortwave channels, which are slowly starting to be recognized by the mainstream. We don't have the kinds of technologies in a ham radio that we take for granted in our cell phone - yet - and bringing ham radio up to speed really hasn't been a priority of its licensees since a lot of them are members of the aforementioned industries who take pleasure in antiquated pastimes, not unlike maintaining and restoring historic vehicles. Younger people don't have really have a good reason to join, and several are led astray by the large gap in age. I got in it at 15, and since it gave me a lot of technical background, it led me to a career. Now in my 20's, I'm finding less interest in it seeing it's basically a bunch of people exchanging names over the air, and sending proof of that exchange over the internet. A lot of youth cannot fathom why you need the radio when you have the internet already. There are a million more facets to ham radio than that, but it's hard to see the forest through the trees. A lot of the advances in ham radio merely tacks on a previous invention to the face of the service, such as this one. It's pretty cool, nobody has done it before and it might be a worthwhile and noble task to apply it to other forms of radio communication, but it - and other recent innovations - kind of lacks the "wow" factor ham radio needs to resurrect itself from it's path to obsolescence.

AWildC182 8y ago
I agree completely. I've also found that the community can be, at times, fairly hostile to the hacker mentality. I've often asked people about trying to get manufacturers to open source their firmware such that it could be modified and improved but I usually just get a line about how "nobody wants to do that so why should they?" or that it's a "waste of their time". The old men seem to only care about playing with shiny new radios but don't seem to care about doing anything interesting with them. I will say though, Travis Goodspeed and his work has been a huge bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape. He's reverse engineered radio firmware, built a ham watch out of a casio calculator watch and an MSP430, and created a ham satellite tracking dish among other things. I really wish we had more people like him. You also mention the preppers... I've come to find that they're basically the only thing keeping the hobby afloat at this point. All of the .22 hoarders keep buying up truckloads Baofengs, Icoms and Yaesus and while some get drawn into it, a lot seem to stick them in the basement and never even bother to get licenced or learn how to use them. There seems to be some internal regret about hitching the hobby to that group but it was all but inevitable given the central nature of EMCOM to the hobby.
- resters 8y ago
  I suggest you step outside of the "Baofeng vs Yaesu" box and explore HF. There is tons of open source hardware and software stuff going on, and it's growing rapidly. Also see my reply to your comment's parent.
unethical_ban 8y ago
Some of it is interest in the spectrum and the need for long range bidirectional radio for modern "hacking" interests isn't there, and what you said, that everything is so closed source and locked up by the hardware vendors, that open, cross platform development isn't intuitive. I haven't looked at SDR, though, so I could be off base.
password4321 8y ago
Related 3 days ago: Ham vs. Ham as Radio Amateurs Are in Conflict with ARRL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157488 > slr555: Amateur radio may seem like a quaint hobby for old timers but there are a number of newer hybrid operating modes that play nicely with the digital world.

resters 8y ago

On the subject of the linked article, I've been wanting to try something like this with SSB audio to see how well the algorithms can understand it. I could provide a broadband SDR IQ recording of lots of SSB audio if anyone wishes to give it a try.