Building a speech recognition system for amateur radio communication
I tend to agree with the many people that say that ham radio is a dying hobby - both literally because it&#x27;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 &quot;preppers,&quot; 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&#x27;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.<p>We don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s, I&#x27;m finding less interest in it seeing it&#x27;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&#x27;s hard to see the forest through the trees.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;wow&quot; factor ham radio needs to resurrect itself from it&#x27;s path to obsolescence.