[arm-allstar] Adding a Voice Command Menu for new or visually impaired Hams.

[am_fm_radio at yahoo.com]

Doug- 

Thank you very much for stepping forward and teaching an old dog new tricks regarding how macro's are Decoded. I eluded in my 1st post, and have found during my 30+ years dabbling with UNIX-Linux-Aix-Hpux-Open64 distro's  As a Senior Field Engineer for a Global Computer Service company;  I never found anything we couldn't do, but rather I just didn't know how to do it.  I appreciate your contributions and have seen your call sign on many pages, I have printed many and placed in my "wizards handbook".  As indicated in my post I experimented with my SHARI-hotspot to come up with what I did. 

About last Thanksgiving, I "volunteered myself" (a suicide move in the military) to "work on" a VHF repeater that had been abandoned at VFW post 3115 Amateur Radio Club, which the club had paid to have ALLSTAR added and it was never finished. The UHF repeater was set up and part of K-Link (Kansas Link) for  SKYWARN and statewide coverage on a private ALLSTAR connection ran by hams in the state capital. VHF had some issues and condition unknown. I do not think there was 2 QSO's on it in a year.

That's when I undertook learning ALLSTAR, re-tuning Duplexers, Rebuilding the PA final, Debugging a VERTEX VXR7000 as it was spurious, resolving network issues in the building, finding and eliminating interference, including the VFW's router. and the ISP modem. Finally the repeater is working with ALLSTAR and usually connected to the Blind Hams Talk Group #50631. Coverage is the entire county around Wichita, Kansas the largest City in Kansas. Since we have a number of blind hams in the WØVFW club, this seems to work for us... We have many area hams who only have HT's so it give them a chance to work "over the horizon". Especially with nets that have worldwide check-ins.
Thanks to your paper on TTS -(Text to Speech)  we have Voice ID that says, "VFW post 3115 Wichita, Kansas WØVFW repeater" with an Female Aussie accent and we've named her--- of course, "SHELIA"
Thanks again. Larry W8LM