MRAM

Actual Listener Comment!

October 3, 2010 by MRAM

What a surprise. I actually received a signal report from a listener. It seems two individuals were visiting in the Cleveland, Ohio area. They are Part 15 radio junkies and have stations in the Pittsburg area.

They checked online for Part 15 stations in the area, found my station listed and drove down to give a listen.

The report was very much appreciated. They found the coverage to be exceptional and the quality of the audio acceptable given the radio they were using. My Talking House transmitter with remote antenna was heard about 1.5 miles out.

I will be sending them my station QSL card (1st one ever sent) to start their BCB collection.

Talking House ATU user instructions

September 9, 2009 by MRAM

Instruction sheet that comes with the Talking House Antenna Tuner Unit.

OOOps, we’ll try again to get the image to upload.

Talking House Transmitter

December 23, 2006 by MRAM

I’ve been using a Talking House for about a year. I checked it’s output on a Motorola Station monitor and the output from the “external antenna tuner” jack was almost 100 milliwatts. The modulation runs up to about 98% and then hard limits.

Out of the box it’s fairly simple to use as it has a built in auto-antenna tuner that works with the wire antenna supplied with the unit. On the wire antenna at 1500 khz, the solid range was about 1/4 mile with the transmitter/antenna on the second floor inside a frame house. Beyond that the signal drops quickly.

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Using the external antenna jack feeding a 3 meter vertical the usable range was almost doubled. The antenna was ground mounted with practically no radial system. I’m sure with some effort put into the antenna system, the range could be much better.

The internal RAM audio recorder/player can store about five minutes of program. It must be a fairly low sample/bit rate as the audio is only suitable for voice. There is also a “live” audio input which when fed with good audio, sounds fairly good. There does seem to be some very low frequency carrier shift when modulated. Wether or not it’s acceptable is subjective.

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I got a deal! I bid at the last second on Ebay and got it brand new for $9.95 plus shipping. Seems it was listed under some obscure listing. No one else bid on it. If you get a good deal like that, it’s worth it.

I have a Metzo also and the Talking House beats the Metzo on output power and ease of use. The Metzo has a nice audio section (gain, compression, limiting) but you’ll find yourself tinkering all the time to get a better sound. Besides, I use ZaraRadio automation which has an excellent audio processor so the Talking House doesn’t have to do any processing.

Talking House advertises a “remote” antenna system (antenna and tuner) but I’ve yet to get a response from them regarding pricing.

www.talkinghouse.com

And if you’re feeling lucky

Talking House Transmitter on ebay.com

Instructions and Users Manual

Talking House Tech News Letter stuff

editor’s note – I’m kind of sorry I posted this link. There are a lot more bids for these now 🙁
Guess I’ll wait untill everyone “forgets” about it before I try to get one 🙂 Hope those sellers are grateful!

Auto Delete

April 12, 2006 by MRAM

by MRAM 1500

The problem was that each hourly NPR newscast download had a different file name. ZaraRadio ver. 1.4.4 didn’t have a way to delete the file after playing it. Since the file name is different everytime, the RANDOM file playlist option had to be used. As such, it didn’t always play the latest download.

Well, I found that I could use a simple batch file run from Windows Task Scheduler to delete the old mp3 file and rename the new download from the IPODDER program so the file name is always the same.

by MRAM 1500

Well, I found that I could use a simple batch file run from Windows Task Scheduler to delete the old mp3 file and rename the new download from the IPODDER program so the file name is always the same.

Now I can run a scheduled EVENT in ZaraRadio for the hourly NPR newscast and always have the latest newscast play.

NEWSCAST Added

April 10, 2006 by MRAM

Well, I decided that I needed some NEWS on my micro station and NPR fit the bill.

They provide hourly updates for IPOD users. They usually introduce it by thanking you for downloading and then run one commercial. The ‘cast runs 5 minutes.

The news is national and international and very good quality. Now I just have to figure out how to automatically delete the file after it’s played.

Well, I decided that I needed some NEWS on my micro station and NPR fit the bill.

They provide hourly updates for IPOD users. They usually introduce it by thanking you for downloading and then run one commercial. The ‘cast runs 5 minutes.

The news is national and international and very good quality. Now I just have to figure out how to automatically delete the file after it’s played.

Next I need to find a good audio source for weather as I don’t have time to record hourly weather updates. I’m using Weather Watcher with ZaraRadio and can insert current Time/Temp/Humidity but that’s not a forecast.

I’ve tried some of the TEXT to VOICE synthisizer programs but they’re just not ready for prime time yet.