Sending a text via ham repeater

Back in February I blogged about Voice Recognition for FM Repeaters.  This to my surprise made the July QST magazine.

I took this a bit further.  Now you can speak a spoken message over the repeater, and it will be converted to text and sent to the corresponding number that you entered on your DTMF microphone.

I made a very cheesy video, as video often explains it easier.  (I beeped out part of my number for some privacy, and you can hear my cellphone talking to the cell tower overloading my cheap microphone)
 


I am not going to give full details on how to do this here, as the point of this blog posting is:
1.) To show you that you can still implement cool stuff with ham radio..
2.) To encourage you think out side the box and mess with things till you stumble into a quick project such as this.

But to point you in the right direction, I will tell you that I created this using a combination of existing things that I have played with prior:

The repeater already has an IRLP board/connection.  This decodes the DTMF and invokes commands on the Linux computer that it is connected to.

Spoken message is converted using the Google Chrome speech input API that I explained in my prior post.

To actually send the text, I am using my Asterisk PBX coupled with a free Google Voice number capable of sending/receiving voice calls and text messages.  But you could just use a email / SMS gateway.

Special thanks to QST editor Steve Ford, WB8IMY for picking up my prior blog and putting it in print.