Listen to the clip below to see why there’s a lot to be excited about with AI and amateur radio! If you watch the far left side of the middle white window, you’ll see me sliding the noise cancellation control up and down as the noise disappears and reappears like magic.

Installation and Setup

Setup with my Flex 6400 was a breeze, and it should be equally simple with other radios (as always, YouTube has several tutorials). You can read the full documentation, or you can just download and run the installer. When you launch the program, you’ll see the main window. The first time you start the program, you’ll need to click on the Options button indicated by the blue arrow:

Once the Options window appears, use the Input selector to choose which audio source to send to RM Noise. In my case, that was the DAX IQ 1 channel. Then use the Output selector to choose the speakers / headphones / etc. you want to hear the sound played back through. Here’s what that looks like for me:

If you’re note sure which DAX stream to choose as your INPUT DEVICE, try this. If you have WSJT-X working on your computer (you’re using Slice Master, right?), go into File > Settings in WSJT-X and click on the Audio tab. Whatever is selected there at the top under Soundcard > Input is what you also want to choose as the INPUT DEVICE for RM Noise. You can send the output wherever you like.)

Check your input level to make sure it’s not too high, and you’re good to go! Now just choose an AI filter that meets your current needs (you can change this setting at any time). There are AI filters for both phone and CW:

Once you’ve selected your filter, you can adjust the amount of filtering using the vertical slider on the left. You can temporarily stop all filtering by hitting the Bypass button at the bottom right.

Overall Thoughts

Training a neural network to pull voice and CW signals out of the specific kinds of noise we hear in amateur radio is a great idea, and this program produces some amazingly clean audio. You can even contribute your own recording of the noise you hear on your radio to help train the model and make the noise cancellation better for everyone (and you should!).

There’s only one aspect of the implementation that concerns me. RM Noise sends your noisy audio to a central server, processes it there, and sends you back clean audio in near real time. That seems to be working fine for now, but probably isn’t a long-term solution. If thousands of people started using the service it would quickly overwhelm their server(s). I hope this centralization is only temporary while the developer is doing the initial model training, and that we’ll eventually have a model that runs locally on our PCs. Research appears to be active in this area.

And Flex users should expect to see this functionality in a future version of SmartSDR.

What I did is delete the empty wsjtx_log.adi from the JTDX directory on my hard drive, and replace that file with a “link” or reference to the wsjtx_log.adi file over in my WSJT-X directory. This way, both WSJT-X and JTDX read and write to the same log file, so they both always know which DXCCs, grids, etc. I’ve already worked and which I still need.

Step by Step

You can set up this link with just a few lines typed at the command prompt. Here’s what I did:

1. Type “cmd.exe” in the Windows search bar. Hold down Control and Shift while you hit Enter. This will launch the command line interface with administrative privileges, which you’ll need to make the link. Windows will ask if you’re sure you really want to do this:

After clicking Yes, I navigated to my JTDX directory by typing:

cd C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\JTDX

and hitting Enter. If your username has spaces, you’ll need to use quotes like this:

cd "C:\Users\David Wiley\AppData\Local\JTDX"

Pro Tip: Rather than typing out all the letters individually, you can type the first few letters of the next directory name and then hit Tab. That will autocomplete the name of the next directory. I love doing this both because (1) it’s faster, and (2) it completely eliminates typos. For example, type:

cd C:\Us

And then hit Tab. Windows will autocomplete that to:

cd C:\Users

Then type a backslash, the first few letters of your username, and hit Tab again. You can keep autocompleting this way until you’ve reached the JTDX directory:

cd C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\JTDX

Then hit Enter.

Once I was in the JTDX directory, I deleted the wsjtx_log.adi file (yes, that’s what JTDX calls it), with the command:

del wsjtx_log.adi

Then, I created the link using the following command:

mklink /H C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\JTDX\wsjtx_log.adi C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\WSJT-X\wsjtx_log.adi

(If you like, checkout the documentation on the mklink command.)

I was rewarded with the following confirmatory message (which, in the box below, scrolls to the right):

Hardlink created for C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\JTDX\wsjtx_log.adi <<===>> C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\WSJT-X\wsjtx_log.adi

And that’s it! My WSJT-X and JTDX are now using the same log file, and all is happiness in FT8 land.

If you liked this little tutorial, share it with a friend or leave a comment below.

Getting in the Right Mindset

Being an instructional designer at heart (and by training), I’ve always been interested in the way the amateur radio exams are structured. There are several topics covered on each exam. For each topic on the exam, there is a “pool” of test items. For example, on the General exam topic 3.2 is Amateur Licensing Rules. There are 11 test questions about this topic. When you take the exam, one question on that topic is chosen at random for you to answer. And that’s how the entire exam is constructed – selecting one test item for you to answer on each topic. This led to insight number one about preparing for the exam. You don’t need to know the answers to all 700 questions in the Extra exam pool! You just need to know the answer to most of the questions for each topic. When you take the exam you may get a few questions chosen at random that you don’t know, but if you know the correct answers to most of the questions for each topic, you’re going to pass the exam.

Searching around the web, I found several sites with study hacks for the exam like “Hacking” the General and Extra exams (from N7SMI) These gave me several additional insights into the exam. For example, despite the seemingly large number of topics on the exam that are math-related, it’s possible to pass the exam without getting any of the math-related questions correct. So don’t let the math scare you off.

The HamStudy.org App

Because I found amateur radio during the pandemic (when in-person testing wasn’t happening), I had taken both my Technician and General exams online via HamStudy.org. They have an absolutely terrific iPhone / Android study app as well ($3.99) that I had used to study for the previous exams. It’s great to study with their app and then take the exam online, because the look and feel of the tool you use to study is exactly the same as the look and feel of the one you use to take the exam. This helps you stay calm during testing since things feel familiar.

The HamStudy.org app includes all the questions in the question bank (about 700 for the Amateur Extra exam) along with their correct answers and crowdsourced explanations for each and every question. These explanations are frequently both fun and clever, and several include their own memory hacks for remembering the correct answer to the question. Although I purchased The ARRL Extra Class License Manual 12th Edition (Spiral Bound), I found that I didn’t actually use it that much to prepare for the exam because the explanations of each question in the HamStudy.org app are so useful. 

Then I started studying in the app, scrolling through question after question. I started in the Read Questions mode, which just shows you the questions with the correct answer highlighted:

At this point, whatever you do, don’t read the incorrect answers! Your goal here is to associate the correct answer with the question. Just read the question, read the correct answer, and then scroll on to the next question. Tackle one Section at a time.

Use Effective Study Strategies

As soon as you’re starting to feel like you’ve got the answers learned, switch to Quiz Mode. Then you can take little quizzes to practice remembering the correct answers for the questions. You want to spend most of your study time in Quiz Mode. When you’re doing the quizzes, you’re engaging in what’s called retrieval practice. (My PhD is in education, and believe me – this is the way you want to spend your study time.) The idea behind retrieval practice is that rather than studying for the exam by reading and trying to get information into your head, you’re going to spend your study time by practicing pulling the information out of your head. After all, on the exam you’re going to need to be able to remember the correct answers, so you should spend your study time practicing remembering them. Think about it this way: if you want to be good at playing the piano, you need to play the piano – a lot! Likewise, if you want to answer the questions correctly on the Extra exam, you need to practice answering the questions – a lot!

Quiz Mode keeps track of how well you’re doing on each question in each section, and in each section overall. Once you’ve mastered most of the questions in a section, leave it for a day and work on other sections. Then come back and practice that section you had mastered again to keep it fresh. This leverages another powerful learning approach called spaced practice.

As I worked in Quiz Mode and started seeing the incorrect answers (or “distractors” as we call them in education), I noticed that sometimes there’s an incorrect answer that looks really similar to the correct answer. In those cases I would try to create a little mnemonic to help me remember which of the two similar answers was the right one. I actually did this for all the math questions. I didn’t do any calculations when I actually took the exam – I answered all the questions from memory. But I also didn’t stress about being able to answer every single question correctly. I knew I needed to know most of the questions for each topic, since that meant the odds were that the randomly chosen question for each topic would be one I knew. When there was a question here or there that I just couldn’t seem to remember, I called it good and moved on.

Put in the Time

We took a family vacation in July, which got me away from work and allowed me to spend 90 minutes or so each day for a solid week drilling questions in Quiz Mode. When we returned I started taking the Practice Exam in the app (which randomly chooses one question from each topic, exactly like the actual exam will do). I passed the Practice Exam the first time I took it. I signed up to take the actual exam three days later, and passed the Practice Exam four more times during those three days while also continuing to work in Quiz Mode.

All three times I’ve signed up to take an exam online through HamStudy.org (Technician, General, and Amateur Extra), I’ve shown up in the Zoom a few minutes early and then had to wait a significant amount of time before I was actually able to take the test (at least 30 minutes each time). Rather than sitting around being nervous about the exam I was about to take, I used the time to drill even more in Quiz Mode! I used Quiz Mode while I waited rather than taking a Practice Exam because Quiz Mode shows you the correct answer to each question immediately after you answer it. This was super effective at helping me keep correct answers fresh in my mind.

As you can see from the screenshot at the top, this approach not only helped me pass the Amateur Extra exam – it got me a perfect score. I hope you find these strategies helpful, too.

I had previously used DXSummit to look for “spots” – that is, to see when A25RU was active making FT8 contacts, and which frequency(ies) they were operating on. I started looking for C92RU the same way. However, I couldn’t ever hear them calling CQ or answering others. I could hear plenty of people calling them, but for days didn’t hear them at all.

Yesterday I stumbled on a feature in DX Summit that I hadn’t seen before. If you click on the name of the DX station you’re trying to spot, you get several options:

When I clicked on the VOACAP Predictions, the following graph popped up:

This chart took a minute to interpret. Each slice of the pie is an hour listed in UTC. As you can see below the “0”, each circular band within the graph represents a frequency band. The color-coding in these band slices indicates how likely it is that you’ll be able to establish a contact. I was very keen to see that today, at 19 UTC on 15m, the likelihood of succeeding was in the upper 70%s. So I set an alarm (3:00pm local) to help me remember to start paying attention then.

When the time came, I looked at the recent spots to see what frequencies C92RU was operating FT8 on. I loaded up WSJT-Z and listened to see if I could hear them. It took a few minutes, but eventually I heard them coming back to other stations. Then they called CQ, I responded, and I quickly got the contact.

The VOACAP Prediction tool made it MUCH easier to find C92RU on the air. I’ll definitely be using this capability more in the future.

Rather than using specialized software to create the card, I made it using Google Sheets. This makes it easy for anyone who would like to create a QSL card based on this design to do so. Just go to the QSL card page, then at the top left select File > Make a Copy > Entire Presentation, like this:

Now you have your own copy of the card that you can change and use however you like.

Eventually, I may need to move to a system where I can automatically generate these cards rather than filling them out by hand. But there’s something lovely and nostalgic about completing them by hand, so I’ll stick with this approach for now.

I received the stickers for my 40m and 80m endorsements for my Digital Worked All States award late last week. Only five states left to go now until I finish 20m. And 23 DXCC entities left to complete my first 100.

Most of the “easy” spots are done now, and now it’s time to settle in for some patient radioing…

As you might imagine, making contacts in the 48 contiguous states was fairly straightforward. Alaska and Hawaii were harder. I made a contact in Alaska after about two weeks, though the QSL didn’t come through for almost another week (which caused me some worry!). I finally made a contact in Hawaii yesterday, using PSK Reporter to spot WH6S on 17m. He sent the QSL overnight, and I applied for the Mixed and Digital WAS Award certificates (and the FT8 endorsement) this morning. They apparently come in the good old-fashioned snail mail, so I’ll make another post when they arrive. I’ll also do a post on how to use PSK Reporter to spot hard-to-find contacts in the near future. Using it definitely saved me lots of time and effort hunting for Alaska and Hawaii.

I’m about halfway to the first DXCC Award – confirmed contacts in 100 countries. So that’s up next!

• 130 Feet (39.6m) long #14 AWG XLPE black wire
• NO TUNER needed!
• Resonant on 80/40/30/20/17/15/12/10m
• 2kW-ICAS max
• Digital mode (FT8) 350W continuous

Three days in, my experience is that the antenna is absolutely wonderful. It tunes right up with the little antenna tuner in the ICOM 7300 I have in my shack. My very first night on the air I worked R7MA on FT8 / 80m in European Russia.

Looking forward to logging more time on HF and getting some more experience under my belt with this antenna.