Last year the committee undertook the task of scanning old paper copies of the QUA newsletter going back as far as 1962. We now have a digital archive of the club’s history, and aside from a few gaps where we didn’t have copies of QUA for some months, the archive constitutes an almost complete history of Cray Valley Radio Society spanning over 6 decades.

The QUA archive, in the form of the PDF scans of all 2,439 pages of the old newsletters, was made available to club members. There is a vast amount of enjoyable material for members to delve into within this historical record, maybe too much for one person to read.

Now the club is offering a new way for members to enjoy the history of Cray Valley Radio Society, by asking questions of an AI curator of the historical archive.

To access this resource, club members can use any web browser on a computer or mobile device and ask any question or request information about the club in plain English at the following web page:

https://www.dragontechnology.com/cvrs/

Ask the AI as many questions as you like; it will never get tired or bored! As with any AI though, it can make mistakes, and some answers may not always be accurate or complete.

How it works

The AI query tool uses a technique called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), where the output of an LLM (large language model) is optimised by referencing an authoritative knowledge base (in this case, the QUA archive as well as the contents of the club web site) outside of its original training data.