[arm-allstar] Weather alert ideas/concepts to pass along

[Mike Sullivan]

Had a wild idea in my insomnia-filled thoughts tonight.. while I am aware
of Autosky, and I am also aware of the argument of the legalities of
rebroadcasting NOAA Weather Radio over the air, we have a weather radio set
up on our repeater to alert on Severe Thunderstorm and Tornado
watches/warnings only. I'd rather have it and not need it, than for someone
to need it and it not be there.. if that makes sense.

That being said, I'm curious of the possibilities of using Allstar to be
able to send out weather alerts to one, or multiple repeaters.

Here's the situation: You have one or more repeaters covering a specific
area/county on Allstar. You also have a NOAA Weather Radio or similar
device constantly monitoring as a separate node on your Pi. NOAA sends out
an alert, the software decodes the SAME transmission and matches the code
to the county (or counties) and repeaters covered by that county. In doing
so, it automatically connects to the repeater, keys up, and begins passing
the traffic from the weather radio. Once finished, it will unkey and
disconnect from that repeater.

I know, that sounds like a far fetched idea. Most operators already have
another means of notification from the NWS (weather radio etc) you may
never know. I'm sure someone would be up to the challenge.

On another, but related subject, we quit using Autosky because of the very
limited scope of information that is passed along. Yes, it lets you know
there is a watch/warning/etc but does not give any specifics (timeframe,
area the alert is for, etc). It would be nice to have an Autosky 2.0 which
reads the alert from the NWS and announces it over the repeater the same as
the weather radio does.

I'm mainly posting this to generate discussion on the idea. I'm not saying
it's a must-have for me, but both ideas would be nice to have.

Mike