Recently, I discovered RM Noise, an AI-powered program that is designed to completely remove and or reduce noise on SSB and CW transmissions.
RM Noise has been trained using a vast dataset of noise recordings, which are unique to each setup and location depending on where your at. You might have a high noise floor that isn’t even caused by the atmosphere. I’m always on the lookout for software that not only goes with my skills with computers and radios, but this project caught my attention due to my experiences with AI as well. My friend near me was the first to show this off to me.
RM Noise’s website if you’d like to check it out is here:
https://ournetplace.com/rm-noise/
What is RM Noise exactly?
At its core, RM Noise is an AI model trained on noise recordings as mentioned above. The process begins when the client program captures the noisy output from the radio. This audio is then sent away to the servers, where it undergoes real-time processing to strip away the noise. The cleaned audio is promptly sent back to the client, allowing for usually very immediate, hopefully better audio. Based on my testing, the latency seems to be around 0.200 to 0.300 ms which isn’t too bad… It is for sure getting into the range where we can tell of a delay but for me I didn’t seem to notice it when I was using actively for QSO’s. It is rather high due to the processing time and then being sent but is still quite impressive that it’s managed that time.
Testing the program
In my tests, I found the AI model to work pretty well for my noise floor, it includes two different models currently for SSB and a few other models for CW and an experimental one for FM as well at the time of writing this. Again, it seemed to work very well, and the program has a customizable slider as well that lets you adjust how much AI filtering/processing is done. Of course this isn’t going to magically pull someone that’s terribly low in the weeds, but it helps a ton if you are able to hear them but that pesky noise is bothering you and your radio’s built in noise reduction is doing not much to help. I can see this being also pretty helpful for people in very noisy areas, like a city. As long as you can somewhat hear them, this program should be able to help out.
I’ve also found it VERY helpful for the static crashes and random pops that happen. Which is very nice if your trying to have a nice long ragchew and you are just getting bothered by the constant static crashes.
Another neat feature that they mention is the “time shift”, which offers the ability to rewind and replay portions of a transmission. To use it, you simply click onto the graph that is on the program on a timeframe in the past, the program seems to let you go back about 4 minutes in time. This feature can be useful in cases where you might’ve missed a piece of a convo and just want to go back, like maybe getting a callsign or something from a quick QSO. I’ve used it a few times and it seems pretty neat.