> > A few people have suggested a delay BUT I would hate to see this > implemented just to manage a problem of a few people who use real-time > access to an SDR to 'cheat' at amateur radio award chasing.
I think you could go a long way to solving the problem of cheating if you implemented a frequency-aware conditional delay. If the receiver spends more than 30 seconds or 1 minute in the 1800-1850kHz, 3500-3530kHz or 3750-3800kHz amateur segments without being moved more than 30kHz, the delay could kick in. Maybe you need it on the "DX" portions of the higher bands, or maybe even in all the ham bands, but I sort of doubt it. Because of the way propagation works, it would be a lot harder to put a readable signal into Europe on 20m and still consider it worth it to use a remote SDR to hear people calling you back. Outside of a few specified sub-segments of a few amateur bands, there doesn't have to be a delay. There's no need for a delay outside the ham bands. There's no need for a delay when the frequency slew rate and tuning pattern is consistent with tuning around the band to see what's out there. A delay will kick in for people who want to stop tuning and just sit and listen to some transmission, but if you want to listen to a long transmission, a delay isn't a problem. When it kicks in you hear the last fifteen seconds AGAIN and then you're up to speed. No big deal. Once you start tuning around far enough, you end up missing fifteen seconds as the system skips back into "real time" mode, but that seems like a minimal issue. A system with fairly simple rules to tell the difference "amateur radio cheating" behavior and proper SWL use could go a long time toward minimizing cheating while keeping the system nice and responsive for ethical users. Such a system will not be perfect, but I suspect those who want to use your system to listen to the ham bands ethically would understand and accept that you need to have it be a little quirky/laggy on the awards-chasing portions of the low bands. I understand that there's a tense balance between providing a high quality remote-controlled SDR experience to your users and inadvertently facilitating cheaters. But the fact is, cheaters are going to gravitate toward ham-band web receivers without delays. Hard to keep them out. The development of some kind of system like this would be a lot more complicated than just putting in a simple delay on all outgoing audio streams, but maybe it's the ticket to making your system "taste bad" to cheaters. 73 Dan _______________________________________________ UR RST IS ... ... ..9 QSB QSB - hw? BK
