I recall the repeaters of the ACC era, how the overused bells and whistles were
viewed as "advanced," and how so many repeaters coast-to-coast had no
individual personalities, only those same canned TI voices and LOUD three-tone
courtesy beeps. I also recall how funny it was to hear the male and female
robots programmed to argue with each other...until about the 100th play.
Digital voice recordings are much nicer to hear than the 'bots, and can reflect
local accents and character, but I shake my head every time I hear an
inattentive CQ-er start a conversation with the automated ID playback.
I love the notion of the courtesy beep as a diagnostic tool, provided it
doesn't distract from the content of the traffic. When I was working on
repeaters for the Blue Ridge Amateur Radio Society in the Carolinas in the
'80s, we were transitioning to CTCSS, but ran the Paris Mountain repeater in
carrier-squelch mode except during periods of interference. Because users were
trying everything from actual PL reeds to 555 chips as encoders, I programed
the SCOM 6K to reverse the high-to-low courtesy beep on transmissions with
correctly decoded tones, so users would know if their tones were good even
during periods of carrier access. It was subtle, but if you were listening for
it, you could easily hear the difference. (I tried to approximate the in-band
cue signals used on the old Mutual Broadcast Network, a very distinctive, but
low-level "bee-doop.")
One member apparently didn't read the club newsletter to know about the
feature, but noticed one day on the air that he had a high-low beep, while the
members of the tech committee had the opposite, low-to-high pitch. He asked why
it was different. My partner on the committee told him the repeater "knows who
daddy is." I was less charitable...I told him it was an IQ detector.
I like hearing a Morse letter as a courtesy beep to identify which of the voted
receivers or linked repeaters was just heard, provided they're quick and not
too loud. Beyond that, except for ancillary functions which can be requested by
a user for just that moment, and perhaps an unsolicited readback to identify a
serious techical deficiency with a signal just heard, I'm a fan of "less is
more."
73,
Paul, AE4KR
----- Original Message -----
From: skipp025
To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 10:46 AM
Subject: [Repeater-Builder] Repeater Bells and Whistles (from an off group
source)
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...
.
