I received the below text from a non group member... who was at one time very active in Amateur Repeaters. His opinion and some technical ideas... enjoy, s.
[pasted text] In my repeater days I went both ways. Started by wanting to add anything that showed the repeater to be "more advanced". We had custom-recorded audio IDs, and at one point, over 500 "repeaterisms" - semi-humourous statements read in any of several celebrity voices...most had to do with repeaters, like "Talkest thou not excessive in length, lest the timepiece of the gods shuttest thou up", in a Charlton Heston-esque voice. Some were mere clips from 60s-era TV "I'm tryin' to think but nothin's happenin!" in Curly's voice, etc. But in truth, none can be very long and we grew tired, in just a few months, of the sound bites. The system we ended up with in Kalamazoo that I liked best was "simple plus diagnostics". We had a courtesy beep and it was the diagnostic reporter. If the incoming signal was more than 500Hz low in carrier frequency, then the beep started at normal pitch, then dropped a whole step. At larger offsets in frequency, the beep dropped further in pitch. High frequency carriers would engender a pitch shift upwards. Of course, this was in the days when most rigs were controlled by a separate xtal per channel, therefore having one of them off, but the others correct wasn't uncommon. For users who were over-deviated, the courtesy beep got louder and was square-wave modulated at 100Hz...a raspy sound. For users whose modulation measured low, the courtesy beep "beeped", that is, it went to a series of dits that slowed down until they stopped. The diagnostic mode was enabled any time the repeater had gone more than ten minutes without a transmission of over a minute in length. We had implemented a "voice back" mode where the repeater played back the last 15 seconds of a received transmission, so people could hear the actual sound of their audio, but not a lot of users liked it, so we shut it off. Nowadays, I just notice what repeaters do or don't do. Around here, it seems that simplicity is the buzzword. A simple courtesy beep is the most any of them seem to have. The exception is that some of them use a voice ID and indicate what the correct subaudible tone to use is. Back in SR, a couple of the local repeaters also had the occasional voice announcement indicating club meeting times/dates and when the club net occurred on the repeater.
