Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet Transformer Tool Launch TPS-0062

Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet Transformer

June 8, 2023. Episode 62

Some people call it the NATO alphabet, or the The International Radio Telephony Spelling Alphabet. I just decided I wanna call it RSA, for the purposes of navigation on my website, but it's referred to in the tool section of my website that says Radio telephony spelling alphabet tool, or transformer, actually.

Probably, if you've been in the maritime field, aviation or military, you probably have already been trained in this.

And, and if not, you are a civilian whose only probably encountered this in movies where you hear them say, yankee nine, niner, bravo, echo one, tango, alpha, zulu, etc.

And you only ever get bits and pieces. And you probably ascertain that what the whole point is that these are words that it's critical that they transmit.

Letters of the alphabet that can easily be mistaken for each other or confused for each other in a distinct manner that uses a longer word with the sound of the first letter being the anchor for that word. So it's unmistakable, and it's a form of encoding, or a set of simplifying it.

You're actually adding to it to make it more distinct in telephone and radio applications, which for most of before recent times of better signal audio quality through digitization.

For most of the time a lot of the protocols and infrastructure that still are purely radio based, at least to my knowledge, they still are, are pretty crushed down to I don't know what the bit rate is equivalent to.

But it's so small that it's just almost unintelligible. And I just can't imagine myself ever being in a situation where I'm responsible for other people's lives with that being the communication medium.

I think that would drive me crazy.

That's something I don't know if I could have ever slept well about being in that scenario.

But I realize that it's very serious. To not be fluent in what only takes 26 slots of memory, really, and then you're done, but you have to continue to do some maintenance on it.

So I realized that I probably, before I built this tool, I probably could remember maybe five of these letters made into words.

But now that I built the tool, obviously I have a decent command of all of them.

What I did in order for the training aspect of the tool is I designed it by hand doing pixel art basically but I designed what you would consider a form of pixel art to make icons to symbolize all of the words in this alphabet and tried to make them as cross-cultural as possible, which is interesting because I looked up reading the Wikipedia about the history of this system.

Something like hundreds of thousands of people were used in the testing to determine across languages which words would be least likely to be confused.

It was just what sounds like an amazing, elaborate, pre-super computer project of human facilitated algorithms to try to determine, through a process of elimination and real trials, which words stood out as distinct.

My first thought swas that what Drunken Sailor started ripping pages out of the encyclopedia to come up with this completely absurd, non sequitur, not just that some of it is very culture bound, meaning you would have to be from a certain culture to get to the reference...

It's not randomness for the purpose of a stronger password or something.

I didn't really understand a logic at all but apparently tt has a lot to do with just the sounds being strategically distinct from each other and then this is the other dimension that you would have to be a linguist.

You’d have to be the top CIA multilingual analyst to even consider things like the reason why you say niner and not nine in the number set is that nine is no in German.

And the reason they say fife F-I-F-E instead of five is that it can sound in certain dialects more like the command in battle to fire, so if the command was stand down in 5 min and everyone heard, fire fire for 5 min, or whatever, then that could be a major miscalculation.

As they like to say in military euphemisms, miscalculation. But I think it's fascinating. I learned a lot in the process, and I had a lot of fun, making these absurdest icons, so that I would never forget, I would have imagery edged in my mind.

So I would never forget what letter goes with, what symbol.

So you can learn it that way by pressing the buttons and seeing the the letter appear and the English spelling appear, and then the phonetic sounding out lettering of it appear as well, and just play with that.

But then the other main feature is that, for a very practical purpose, which is, I think, where it's very appropriate for civilians to have this part of their basic civics training, if you will.

Whether it's your credit card information or you're trying to book a room or schedule something, or it's an emergency situation, you're trying to convey your address or something.

It's radio telephony. And there's a lot of confusion that happens.

And there's a lot of letters when you're trying to isolate letters, and numbers.

It becomes very important that you are able to synchronize with whoever you're communicating with over the wires or over the networks.

And there needs to be a perfect 100% copy of all of that information.

And while some of us go into it with A as in apple, B as in Bob, you know, etc.

The clever spirit of the system that's already been devised, it's factored in the importance of sound, of words sounding different, and maybe not always being a cross-cultural match, in terms of instantly it creating an image in their mind that makes it obvious.

No matter what culture you come from, if everybody has the same system it almost doesn't matter what the words mean, as long as you memorize them.

The association of these packets of consonants and vowels that are all anchored to the individual letters, what matters is that it's a shared map of the encoding scheme.

I'm interested in the idea of, from now on, if it's a credit card over the phone or address or something where it typically might get confused, or even email addresses is even more often in these days of email over the phone.

You’re not gonna get the email because something is gonna be a letter or two off.

Because of the economics of globalization, there are call centers in different countries.

I'm just stating the obvious by saying that there can be a mismatch in non-native English speakers.

Those are the situations which now in the modern age over the phone, tech support, whatnot.

Just winging it with trying to come up with words and then realizing now that actually it would be better practice and it would be a better standard, it would be be a soft sell to upgrade the civilian community with mil-spec best and standard practices.

That's a good to have in your mental rolodex ready to go and so with this tool that I've made of course I don't wanna make just another app that makes it easier to do things that you should have memorized.

I don't wanna take away all of the responsibility to learn it.

However, I think it’s a counterbalance by simultaneously offering a learning tool but also a sort of a tool in the form of an app where you can you can it on the client side of your browser without sending any information out over the wire.

If someone downloads the page that I built that has the tool, and they use the form field to enter in the the text that they want to have be broken into and and displayed word by word to them, Hotel, Echo, Lima, Lima, oscar, whisky, oscar, romeo, lima, delta. All right. Did I get that right?

Now there's no excuse. And now I wanna make a drinking game out of it for kicks and giggles.

From now on, anyone who wants to be my friend, I'm going to force us to have a drinking game where we play with my rsa radio telephony spelling alphabet toy and maybe we'll end up figuring out how to say very crude jokes in this drinking game.

So you get the idea, although disclaimer, this is not drinking advice.

This is not medical advice, is not gaming advice.

But it is for your information that a client side javascript application has been built as a gift from me to you.

Not just to play a drinking game with your friends for kicks and giggles, but if you are drawing a blank, and you don't have this memorized, but you want to be very clear in a situation, let's say you are in a country where you're the only english speaker in that emergency situation but there are people who know letters and they and they know this system and you're able to use this tool.

That will be, that would be great. I've said this before I'm in a mode where I don't care to compete with anything on the App Store.

There may be a million other versions of apps on Web 2.0 and the App Store and whatever.

I did this in isolation to just push myself through an exercise of the computer science, data science, logic that would be needed to build the interface and apply the logic.

And for me, that was its own adventure of programming, that I'm having this renaissance chapter that I never had earlier in life…

I was just the end user of the game, or maybe a little bit of drag and drop, GUI web admin and web design.

But now I'm a full-on, line by line multi language code writing, reading, developer in training, and I'm enjoying it.

And so I will continue to release more tools. And again, maybe by the time you hear this, there will be more features added to the architecture of a game experience, where you would pull that up as a panel to go about your mission.

I'll build a discrete tool and have it be listed as a standalone tool. But then I will also be building games where those tools get interwoven into the game play and, and you will encounter them through game play.

Hopefully you got a laugh, and maybe you learn something and hopefully, if we ever talk, we will be able to have a beer, and play this game and not put either of each other on a stretcher, we'll play it so poorly.

Hopefully we'll just be able to enjoy a drink or two out of the process.