[arm-allstar] Version 1.3 Weather Script Howto

[Doug Crompton]

Be aware that if you use Cepstral to be legal by their licensing you need to buy the broadcast license if any voice is sent over the air. I believe the license is $120. Whether you do that or not is up to you. They also only offer one voice for the ARM processors.
About the only Linux based TTS that sounds reasonable is NOT free and some are very expensive. There are ways to record ID's and other repetitive messages with free online TTS to file generators that sound good but weather is unique in that it is constantly changing and you would need to access any online service too often. That is what happened to Google TTS. They block repetitive requests.

The whole weather thing is a moving target both in TTS and also in the actual alerts from the NWS. It is not a trivial thing to do. I know Chris is overwhelmed in personal and work matters and it is doubtful if he is going to continue to support the weather scripts. We also have many more important projects for Allstar in the works but not weather.

It requires a substantial amount of work to write and maintain so that a limited number of users can benefit from a novelty we may not really need given the state of other communications avenues. Weather alerting has improved significantly over the years. No one should be in the dark about weather if they have a phone, computer, TV, Radio, etc.

Weather geeks are certainly unique. I have weather stations at both of my homes and with reporting to weather underground I can look back at statistics and get the current local conditions on any computer. I don't see any need to hear that over the radio other than to say I can do it and maybe show off to other people who really don't care as they get the same thing on their smart phone.  

It is also not clear exactly what the rules are for retransmission of NOAA weather broadcasts. At one time it was legal but for forecasts it is not any longer. I believe from what I have read that alerts may be legal. This would be a rather simple way to include alerts on your local system using local NOAA broadcast and a weather alerting system that transmits actual NOAA alert on your local repeater or node. See this link for detailed information on this -

http://www.repeater-builder.com/tech-info/weather-radios.html

73 Doug
WA3DSP
http://www.crompton.com/hamradio


 		 	   		  
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