Greetings:

For quite a long while, really, since I started using Allstarlink back
in September of 2019, I thought it would be cool to have a parrot node
that not only does the obvious and parrots your audio back to you, but
also gives you a reasonable idea if your audio level is too high, too
low, or just about right. To date, I haven't seen anyone do this on
Allstarlink, though there is a Brandmeister talkgroup (forget what it is
now) which isn't a parrot, but it will tell you if your audio level is
good or not with one of several announcements.

There are a couple of Allstar parrot nodes, for example the DVSwitch one
at 42565. I've never liked it much, though, as the audio that comes back
from it is pretty choppy, most likely because it's running on a very
low-end VPS, possibly with some timing issues, so you never know if that
choppiness is because of your internet connection or something else.

The UK Hubnet parrot (40894) is much more reliable, even for those of us
who aren't in that part of the world, and, while it is excellent at what
it does, I wanted to add more functionality to the concept.

So, I've done a version of this, plus audio parrot, for Allstarlink. It
will first tell you if your audio is very low, low, normal, above normal
but still reasonable, high, or WO! DUDE! That's way too loud! not
exactly in those words, and then parrot your audio back to you.

You can find it at node 55553. It's running on a HamVoIP node in Dallas,
TX. It's on the same Raspberry Pi that is hosting the Blind Hams Dallas
node at 506315. I figure that putting it in the middle of the country,
and not on a VPS means that you should get a pretty good idea of
real-world internet conditions from where you are to that part of the
world, at the very least, with stable playback from the node.

As this is a version 1.0, and I'm doing some strange stuff to make this
all function in the first place, there are still some bugs to work out,
and some small things that I want to change, mostly to make it a little
cleaner, but for the most part, it does what I want it to do.

Feel free to use it as often as you like. If you notice something
particularly odd about it's operation, feel free to throw things at me,
and I'll see what I can do to make things less odd.

73

N2DYI



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73
N2DYI