Stuart, W8SRC, who is the guy behind the W8SRC Repeater guide here on KB6NU.Com, emailed me a couple of weeks ago:
In the interest of helping out his ham radio club at his college in New Mexico (the Tech Amateur Radio Association, club call KC5ORO), I asked my friend Skyler Fennell, KD0WHB (the 2016 Bill Pasternak Young Ham of the Year) if I could voice some repeater IDs for TARA. He said that he has been looking for new IDs and other messages to freshen up the sound of the repeater, and he gave me the go-ahead to do so. After looking up some info about the club, and watching his well-put-together video on the complete construction of his club’s repeater, I came up with quite a number of IDs to voice.
Once I voiced them, I sent them to my good friend Chad Beach, W9GGA, who is also the production guy for my radio station, to add some production effects to my voice and in the background of the IDs. When they were done, I sent them back to Skyler and he really seemed to like them; he is going to put them on the TARA repeater when he gets back to New Mexico next month. If UMARC decides to upgrade their 25-plus-year-old repeater controller at some point, I’d love to do something like this for our club!
Attached is a compilation of all the produced IDs that I sent Skyler. I’m hoping that you’d be able to put that on your blog if you’d like.
Here is Skyler’s video on the repeater’s complete construction:
If your repeater ID is getting a little stale, perhaps this will give you some ideas on how to freshen it up a bit, and if you want, Stuart is ready to help. He notes, ” I’d love to help “image” more repeaters across the country and around the world!”
Walter Underwood says
Those have a lot of phasing between right and left. Not sure that is a good idea on a mono transmitter.
Stuart, W8SRC says
I guess it depends on whether the IDs are uploaded directly to the controller or recorded over the air with the radio held up to a speaker. Especially if the radio is held up to a pair of stereo speakers, I don’t think that would work as well. In Skyler’s case, he uses Asterisk and converts the files to mono and to 8 kHz sample rate (in some weird format called .ulaw) in order to tell Asterisk to play the uploaded file as an ID. In case that doesn’t sound good on the air, I gave him the dry versions of the IDs as well.
Bob says
One thing many hams must. Learn is to let the repeater ID before they give their call. Repeaters silent for 10 minutes will ID when keyed up. Giving your call blocks the ID and really rude to do that. Others key up let the machine ID then they give their call
Ron Wright, N9EE says
Never use LMR or any other coax with different shields on a repeater. can cause noise from the transmitter interfering with the receiver. Obviously someone not that familiar with building repeaters. Also frequencies for tx and rx were up side down. Most of US UHF repeaters transmit low, receive high (rcv is 5 MHz above the tx freq).
Ron Wright, N9EE says
In 70s there were repeater IDs in famous peoples voices like Ronald Reagan. Like “I am busy as president, but when I do get on my Ham rig I use the W4XYZ repeater in Dayton”. Jimmy Stewart was another voice used.
Darrin says
Can these also be used on gmrs repeaters