No one has contributed to this thread in a long while. It's belated but some comment is needed here, and since I was the last active contributor, I probably ought to have already said something;
It's too daunting task to fill in the gap in the timeline – I've continued to monitor the HFGCS since Nov 2024, but most of my transcriptions are published already. Rather than by-day logs, I ended up publishing most of what I have to per-message-length logs on a GitHub. It serves to confirm a number of theories I had going about (1) the structure of these messages and (2) whether any 'analysis' was inherently an issue the way some people claim;
https://neetintel.github.io/More importantly, this was very much SIGINT's thread – he started it and was the most active contributor. He passed away in 2024, as discussed in another thread on this board
here.
It is surprisingly difficult for the average person to transcribe EAMs correctly, and most transcriptions you will find made by people are off. I know even when I looked back on my own early transcriptions where I kept audio for verification, I'd often have ome variation of, you know, "oh, for goodness sake".
SIGINT's dataset of transcriptions don't all have audio accompaniment so verification can be difficult, but it's an interesting exercise to cross-reference his transcriptions with the apparently identified structures of repeating elements as highlighted on my GitHub index, and compare it with SIGINT's transcriptions. There are some caveats – some callsigns are not quite right (but understandably so), and I don't think I end up finding evidence to support his methodology of splitting EAM transcriptions up into sets of five characters – but his transcriptions generally agree with the structures that have ended up being 'revealed' thanks to the wonders of regular expressions and machine learning.
Monitoring the HFGCS is ultimately a pastime and the question of what – if anything – anyone hypothetically does with all these transcriptions in the future is a big question mark. Many people have claimed to meaningfully monitor the HFGCS for years, decades, etc. and from my perspective, most of the ones I've crossed paths with have unknowingly given themselves away (by way of various 'shibboleths', if you like) as exaggerating. I did not communicate with SIGINT very much, but from the conversations I did have with him, and immediately obvious from his posts in this thread, he was absolutely genuine and credible.
It is a fairly small club of people who really have put a remarkable amount of time and effort into this very unique hobby. If it ever amounts to anything, SIGINT should always necessarily be mentioned when discussing that club, and if anyone does end up 'building on top of all this', SIGINT's efforts can be recognized as quality worth building on top of, and necessarily be acknowledged as a consequential component of all this.
Thank you and godspeed, SIGINT!
