ChatGPT isn't a search engine Or is it?

One of the kids' and my great consternations around large language model (LLM) AIs is the variety of claims that they can't match the performance of a search engine, and well yeah, They're Not Search Engines! They're a completely different thing. They're sentence completion engines that have the entire Internet at some set date at their disposal. They organize the information they were trained on into a greater than 1,000 dimensional space (in most cases) and then do a dot product of what you've told them so far with that space to determine what they should say next.

Having said all that, after performing the following search on Google this morning:

"what do you call a cross frequency radio contact"

and getting no useful results, I headed over to ChatGPT to chat with the app about our fictional friend, Penelope. She's a programming and ham radio expert who went away on an expedition. The kids and I are communicating with her via ham radio (all of this is fictional). Here's how I started my conversation with the AI this morning:

Penelope and I frequently make amateur radio contacts where I transmit on one frequency, but then receiver her signal on another frequency. What whould she call those kinds of contacts? I'm trying to describe them to my team members, and I know there's a name for them, but I can't remember what Penelope called them.

and I immediately got back:

It sounds like the type of contacts you're referring to is known as "split operation" in amateur radio. In split operation, the transmitting and receiving frequencies are different. This technique is often used in situations where the frequency congestion is high, and it allows for more efficient use of the available spectrum.

For example, if you're operating on a frequency to transmit, but there's a pile-up of stations trying to contact you, you might receive the incoming signals on a different frequency. This helps to organize and manage the communication flow, allowing the operator to transmit on one frequency while listening on another.

If Penelope used a specific term for this type of operation, it might vary, as different operators sometimes have their own colloquial terms for certain practices. However, "split operation" is a widely recognized term in the context of amateur radio.

Which, then, searching Google for

split operation

gave a long list of useful results:

Not bad!

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