KF6NCY Project Page


 

Im working on a Computer Controlled VHF (or any mode I guess) repeator.

The main section of the project is centered around a neat little shareware program called RLM. Its a DOS based program that gives you voice mail, weather, and other neat gimmicks including CW tutor. You can find it at http://vbk.campus.luth.se/~rlm/english1.htm. The only draw back is that the programer is from Sweden and the pre-recorded voices are in Swedish. But other than that it is a real nice little program.

RLM even gives schematics for creating a controller that hooks to your parallel port. I am attempting to find the parts for this but they are reference in a Swedish catalog. If anyone can help me here I would be very appreciative. Write me at [email protected]

Text-to-Speech

Because of the audio files being in Swedish I have set out to convert them to English. But since I don't want to hear my own voice over and over, and my wife says she does not have a great voice I have decided to create the messages using a computer generated voice.

Once I started looking for such item I discovered that it is difficult to locate anything easily that sounds good. There are a few Windows products but they only speak to the speakers. I need something to create a wav file wich then can be converted to a voc file for the program.

Well I finally tracked one down that does just this and is FREE for non-commercial usage. Its called MBROLA and can be found at the The MBROLA PROJECT HOMEPAGE. This wonderful system uses phoneme to create the most realistic sounding output I have found. But I hit another snag. You must be able to write the input file in phoneme notation and I could do it but it would take a very long, long time. So I needed a Text-to-Phone which would then be fed to MBROLA. But the only such program was written for UNIX.

Its called Festival Speech Synthesis System. So I installed Linux on my machine once again simply to try this program out. I am still down loading it so ill have to let you know how well it works.

After I get everything set I will put more details on this page. I will also see if its ok with the author of RLM for me to post the English computer generated voc files.

 

Mapping Software.

I have done some work with the AZ_PROJ platform independant mapping software. It allows you to create maps of the world or your QTH, and you can input repeators and have them map there circle of influence.

If you are interested in this you can test the system out on-line, and if you like it you can download the source code to your PC. It uses Post Script technolagy so if you are using Win or dos you will need to get GhostScript.

 

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