[aprssig] "Blind" APRS

[Steve Noskowicz]

These are only loosely related, but:

A - 
  I've been helping K9EYE a blind ham with misc projects.  Some time back, he attended an APRS demo at Handi-Hams and thought it was useless (the maps).  After hearing me talk about APRS his mind started working and he had a back-pack HT-tracker made for him by the Handi-hams folks.    The local repeater also has Echolink.
  Now, he can walk around town and talk to anyone around the world on Echolink who can then tell him where he is, if needed.  
  He can also use a cell phone for any non ham to use findu to see his whereabouts.    Pretty cool, eh?
  Only problem is that he isn't close enouth to the local digis for good coverage and is working on putting together his own fill-in digi.

B -
  I have speech synthesizers in three of my rigs in anticipation of having problems in the future. However, reading off digits stinks, to say the least.  So...
 I wrote VB code to speak frequencies much more naturally.   e.g. 7150 is "seventy one fifty"  IIR 146.94 is "One forty six, nine four". It's not 100% human spoken, but pretty good.  It parces the digits right to left and based on which digits are present, builds speech-command strings producing the more natural speech patterns.
   I'd give it to anyone wanting it.  The VBA algorithm can be translated to the language of your choice. It sends what I'm pretty sure are standardized speech synthesizer commands.  I developed it using the Double Talk module.  
  It's currently in an Excel spreadsheet macro which sends frequency commands to a 706 and speech commands to the speech synth on a single serial port with a Wye (the CI-V commands and Double talk commands are orthogonal, i.e. non overlapping).

--
You know that sea of entropy we were going to drown in?  Well, upon closer examination, it turned out to be ignorance.  S. Noskowicz 1987
73, Steve, K9DCI


--- On Fri, 11/7/08, Patrick <winston at winston1.net> wrote:

> From: Patrick <winston at winston1.net>
> Subject: [aprssig] "Blind" APRS
> To: "TAPR APRS Mailing List" <aprssig at tapr.org>
> Date: Friday, November 7, 2008, 3:13 PM
> We were chatting about APRS on the way to work the other day
> on the local repeater.  One
> of the guys in the discussion brought up something I've
> never really considered.  Is
> there any currently system(s) for using APRS which would be
> usable by a blind operator?
> 
> If so, does anyone here know of any end users of such
> systems that wouldn't mind trading
> a couple emails on the subject?  I'm prepping a
> presentation on APRS for January, and
> thought that adding some content on that aspect might
> ensure that even people who know
> about APRS might learn something they didn't know
> before..
> 
> p