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

[David McGough]

Mike,

There is already code to read the alerts/bulletins as retrieved from the
NWS over the Internet. In fact, this was the original code. Fairly
quickly, the hiccup became that all the free, reliable text to speech
systems (TTS) dried up.

I feel sure there are still some hams out the there using commercial TTS
packages for just this application. I'm not sure of the legality---most
TTS packages I've seen explicitly disallow transmission/broadcasting in
their use licenses.

Directly retransmitting NOAA audio is NOT a direction to pursue; I know
this personally. While I'm sure some hams are getting away with this,
they've been lucky enough to quietly fly under the FCC RADAR. If some
local troublemaker starts sending notices about this to the FCC, unless
the political climate has changed, the repeater trustee will eventually be
getting a nasty-gram.  Again, I know of this type of enforcement activity
personally.

The single biggest factor I see is the need for a free, high quality TTS
system or, alternatively, a comprehensive library of audio samples of
words used in the NOAA vocabulary. A challenge with the library approach 
is NOAA's inclusion of obscure local names and references in the 
bulletins. This definitely increases the complexity of a general-purpose 
solution.

Just some thoughts...

73, David KB4FXC



On Sun, 8 Mar 2020, "Mike Sullivan via ARM-allstar" wrote:

> 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
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