Copasetic Flow

 Yesterday I posted about ChatGPT5 writing a TensorFlow CW decoder. It's actually decoding clean CW from its training data, but when I feed it audio recorded from an actual HF receiver, nope. I asked ChatGPT to write me a script to inspect the recorded audio and found out why this morning. The first thing I should point out is that this particular model is learning Morse code the wrong way. It is defineitly comparing dots and dashes. It's based on a vision neural net and so... The second thing I should point out is that it's learning Morse code faster than I did, so, you know, that's pretty impressive. OK. Here's why the AI isn't understanding RF-borne CW yet. Here's a spectrogram that corresponds to its self created training data. This particular one is from the video I posted about yesterday. The video is included again below so you can listen to the code as well. This is fairly impressive in that you can in fact actually read out the dits and dahs. Now, ...

 This week's AI project is to create an AI Morse code decoder. I've been working with the new ChatGPT 5 model since late last week. I've asked a few different models if they could understand Morse code. ChatGPT 5 couldn't. Gemini couldn't. That's when it occurred to me that this was probably the perfect time to learn how to use TensorFlow to make an AI. So, I changed my question. I asked ChatGPT 5, "If I wanted to setup a model that learned Morse code using Google's Tensor engines, could you describe the entire process and output the code for me?" To which it promptly, (what an awesome pun!), replied, "Heck yes—that’s a super fun project. Here’s a complete, practical path to a TPU-accelerated Morse code recognizer using TensorFlow + CTC (Connectionist Temporal Classification). It generates synthetic Morse audio (with realistic timing/noise/tempo wobble), trains a small CRNN on log-mel spectrograms, and decodes with greedy CTC. You can run it ...

  Almost a year ago, I made a POTA activation from DC in Freedom Plaza. I'm discussing antennas and buildings today with Bill Meara of the soldersmoke blob and published this map to carry along the conversation. I alternately convince my myself that buildings do not matter, and then a few weeks later, that they do. QSO Map

 Logitech Logi Capture turns out to be better at capturing fine details in  a screen replay than the Microsoft Snipping tool.  Here's a demo. The Windows munging is more apparent in a larger frame or full screen. Videos Logi Capture Windows Snipping Tool

  I knew I saw a video with 9 volt batteries used for arc welding!  During the ongoing discussion about Agent Sonya , using 9 volt batteries as a vacuum tube plate current power supply came up. I found references to doing such a thing on one of Pete's blog post s. I also vaguely remembered a Jeri Ellsworth video where forty 9-volt batteries were connected in series. (The tops of these batteries makes the operation fascinatingly simple.) I finally found the video today. It is amazing! So! We now have visual evidence that nine volt cells can be put to rather spectacular use!

 I've been looking for an excuse to try parallel processing with Python for a few months and yesterday, the FBI provided one. They released a collection of records related to the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr. It's easy enough to get a count of the pdf files released from the announcement page . Information about the files released to the National Archives I was able to quickly read that there were 6,301 files. A brief internet search indicated that the files have not been released in any kind of compressed container, like a zip file yet. I also tested that the search box only searches the pdf file names, not their contents. The immediate next question was how many bytes of disc space do all the pdfs consume? I asked Chat GPT o4-mini-high to write a Python script to determine the size of the all the files combined. The script was unable to determine the size of each file by looking at the HEAD of the URL for each file, so it wound up having to use GET req...

 While doing some experiments about how someone might backup the Soldersmoke blog, I came across an interesting issue. I'd worked with ChatGPT to create a Python script that stored a post from the soldersmoke blog in a directory. The name of the directory was the date and time of the blog post concatentated with the the blog post title. In most cases, this wound up being a file name with more than 256 characters. I dont' remember where I tried my first prototypes a few months ago, but whatever system I was on, it wasn't Windows, because Windows doesn't support folder or file names longer than 256 characters. Google drive, however, does. As a result, when I tried to download the folders to a Windows machine, I got an error message indicating that the zipped directories from Google Drive could not be read. The simple fix, it turned out, was to change the naming scheme of the folders so that they contained only the timestamp of the post down to the second in UTC time. Wit...