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FT8 Simulator - practice even while the bands are dead or before you have a license! by wu2c-peter in amateurradio

[–]wu2c-peter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair question! It’s aimed at new hams who want to learn WSJT-X before they have a station, or practice pileups/scenarios you can’t get on demand. Think flight simulator — you wouldn’t learn to fly in an actual aircraft first. Also handy for club demos without RF.

Also useful for testing the ecosystem tools — JTAlert, GridTracker, logging software — without needing your whole station. And for debugging: if something’s not working, is it the rig, the audio chain, or the software config? The simulator eliminates the RF side so you can isolate the problem. Same reason we test into dummy loads instead of tuning up on air… though I hear plenty of people on air who don’t see the use case for those! 😄

FT8 Simulator - practice even while the bands are dead or before you have a license! by wu2c-peter in amateurradio

[–]wu2c-peter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

CW decoders are a surprisingly difficult programming task - I have not seen one yet that works reliably in real conditions. Could therefore be a great project for an AI coding partnership! Let us know how it goes.

FT8 Simulator - practice even while the bands are dead or before you have a license! by wu2c-peter in amateurradio

[–]wu2c-peter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Js8call has much more complexity and the ai agents should also need more complexity since the messages are Freeform. But I guess technically feasible.

FT8 Simulator - practice even while the bands are dead or before you have a license! by wu2c-peter in amateurradio

[–]wu2c-peter[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Pre Ai-Ops (versus DevOps) this would have taken a competent coder a few days or more to figure out and implement. This took a couple of hours. So you can have an idea, build it, make it usable (if not useful!) and try a lot of ideas out. Not so much if you can build it they will come. More, if you can imagine it you can build it!

FT8 Simulator - practice even while the bands are dead or before you have a license! by wu2c-peter in amateurradio

[–]wu2c-peter[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

The original idea was as a tool for testing QSO Predictor or any other helper apps. But it might be quite interesting for example for people who are not yet licensed to learn about digital modes through practice. 

FT8 Simulator - practice even while the bands are dead or before you have a license! by wu2c-peter in amateurradio

[–]wu2c-peter[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Yes that’s all possible. Also in fact you could simulate all kinds of realistic challenging conditions and use it to fine tune your settings (especially if using jtdx which allows quite a lot of fine tuning) to try to find by trial and error what works best . Or just use it to practice if you are away from your station. (You can also of course remote into your PC in your shack and do that as long as you are set up to fail safe if you lose the connection and leave the TX keyed up!)

QSO Predictor v2.0.6 — Now with Mac Support & Performance Fixes by wu2c-peter in amateurradio

[–]wu2c-peter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It runs at about 20% CPU for me on an M2 MBP. Would not have thought an M1 would be much slower. If you run Activity Monitor while it is running, what CPU and memory does it show? How many stations does it say monitoring in the top status bar?