On 26/09/2019 01:12, Bill Frantz wrote:
On 9/25/19 at 3:52 PM, g4...@classdesign.com (Bill Somerville) wrote:
On 25/09/2019 23:42, Bill Somerville wrote:
whereas the index into a table of 64 values (48 states + 14
provinces + DC + DX) takes a mere 7 bits to store.
This is actually an interesting problem. We can divide the contesters
into those activating the counties and those trying to contact them.
The worst case I've heard is 252 Texas counties, but the 7QP will also
have a big number.
One other problem is that some of the state QSO parties take place on
the same weekend, and of course, some people try to make contacts in
more than one QSO party. If the sum of all counties involved is small
enough, it might be possible to support this behavior.
Lets assume: For the US state QSO parties, each station only activates
counties in one QSO party. (We do need to support rovers.) It will
need to receive locations from all the counties in that QSO party +
the other states/provinces. People sending to it will need to know
which table it is using.
We can select the table by the weekend data, and starting week before
for testing. There might also be a UI affordance which allows manual
selection for use in closed group testing. (For such testing, I
suggest ditching the radios and just using the built-in audio of
several computers in the same room.)
For non-US QSO parties, similar techniques might work. Consider a QSO
party with the counties of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as
the activated counties. :-)
73 Bill AE6JV
Hi Bill,
you are missing a critical and fundamental issue. WSJT-X is used to make
QSOs by exchanging all necessary information on the radio channel. You
seem to be proposing that users must configure the software for a
particular interpretation of the information bits being exchanged, that
is not making an Amateur Radio QSO, at best it is a hybrid QSO with some
information being passed by some means other than radio. Note that in
FT4/FT8/MSK144 modes every receiving instance of WSJT-X or other
applications claiming compatibility will decode exactly the same
messages as each other given any particular transmitted message, the
configuration of the software does not change the interpretation of the
message bits. Unless you can find a way to send the "selector" for your
proposed set of tables of message fields within the same message that
sends the table index; then you are not proposing an extension to these
modes but a different mode that does not pass all information via the
radio channel.
The bottom line is that there are still a handful of selectors available
in the FT4/FT8/MSK144 message payload bits that could be used for new
message schemes but nowhere near the number that would be needed to
support a series of county based QSO parties or similar.
73
Bill
G4WJS.
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