Click here to jump to TEARA's Website!

[bullet] Our old talking DX Cluster announcements are returning to simplex and our repeaters to aid in DXing. KT4BN and WB4IUY designed and developed this back in the mid-90's to allow local hams who didn't have internet or packet radio to get the current DX spots right off their 2m or 440 voice rigs. It was named "DX Talker", though Jimmy Wooten K4CMH (sk) called it "Alice". V1 ran blind. Our UHF repeater was pretty quiet, so it wasn't a big deal... most of the time.

Version V2 was born... In version V2, we re-designed it to be intellegent and polite, to not interfere with other voice conversations that might have been ongoing. It would load spots in memory, and then, when things got quiet for about 30 seconds, it would speak: "ding ding ding, new DX W12BI on 14.175 mhz"...or whatever the call and freq was. :-)

It was originally written in VB, and used an old IBM xt with a 8086 processor and 256KB (!!) of memory. The seral port was used to extract the stream from a packet radio and TNC that was parked on the local packet DX Cluster. The RF side of things was an old UHF Motorola Micor, originally used by the NC Forestry Association. We converted it to work into our local UHF repeater on 442.40, and the DX Talker was a hit. The parallel printer port was used to provide the PTT signal to the radio, and to act as an input device to detect the COR signal from the radio when the repeater was active. Transmit audio was sent to the Micor from a very early, crappy soundcard and coupled via a 600:600 audio isolation transformer.

Time moves forward about 30 years...KF4DBX is now in the loop modernizing things quite a bit. We're de-mothballing the DX Talker, and giving it a facelift. It's being updated to take the cluster feed from the internet via telnet. I/O will be via USB, using a usb-to-serial adapter. Soundcard audio will be much improved. Version 3.0 is gonna be HOT! More changes will be released thortly in 3.1, but we're getting 3.0 upand running, first.


***Follow along, if you're interested. Updates will be in the Club Bulletins section. Take a moment to Join TDXA! It's free, and you'll help us with our contest footprint. Who knows, you might want to work a little contest stuff with us and you'll be ready to go!


RETURN to the main TEARA Webpage!