Amateur Radio Repeater IDs! Even More than Ever Before!

For the week ending August 9th, PacketMan and Mother Radio return to the Random Access Thought with more Amateur Radio Repeater IDs! Even more than ever before! In this Star-Spangled episode, our almost forgotten digital dude PacketMan not only has more to offer from his personal MP3 player but he is now in conversation, making use of standard English language contractions, thanks largely to a Linguistic Vernacular Firmware Upgrade!

The focus is on classic digital male voice IDs, analog female voice IDs and "Repeaterisms", hosted by professional voice-over artist Bill Hamilton of the Musicol Studios, in Columbus, Ohio. In addition, there are also custom WA4TEM IDs included in this RAT which were kindly provided by Greg Williams K4HSM, our official TWIAR Webmaster. I thank Greg again for those cool clips which made for some fun editing when this feature was produced back in February of 2006!

Catch the Random Access Thought, along with all the latest news over the official This Week in Amateur Radio Podcast. Look for TWIARi Edition #185 and TWIAR Edition #800. To get the Random Access Thought separately and to hear other RAT, RAF, QSL and BLOG clips go to:

http://twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts

Look under file: RAT060205_BCQ.cab and RAT060205_HAM.cab. Right click on each file and "Save Target As". Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the files.

Amateur Radio Repeater IDs: And an almost completely forgotten Random Access Character!

This week's episode of the Random Access Thought was designed and assembled in January 2006. The topic is Amateur Radio Repeater IDs. While the vast majority of stateside VHF and UHF repeaters rely solely on controller-generated CW IDs, there are those machines whose station identifications have taken a far more creative turn, usually in the form of clever professionally announced custom voice recordings or select audio clips from popular television programs or big time motion pictures edited to fit the needs of the repeater ID. Some excellent examples sourced from the Internet play this week on This Week.

In this edition, actually the first of two Random Access Thought programs on Repeater IDs, an early and virtually forgotten voice character known as PacketMan visits with Mother Radio with his audio collection of IDs, Much like some of the other voices within the program ensemble, PacketMan speaks with a digitally peculiar and somewhat truncated AX25 burst before each sentence. PacketMan appeared in both Repeater ID RATs and at least one Christmas Special Since then, PacketMan has been MIA. It has been suggested that PacketMan may have morphed into another voice character: TANK. Unfortunately, I am not always privy to these guys' personal lives.

Back then, Mother Radio spoke with a much slower cadence and her tone was a bit screechier. These days MR (Beverly Krasnov) belts it out at a brisker clip and enunciates with more of a Gravel Gertie tone. Plus she's a bit older and certainly a bit bitchier.

In the promos that precede, a much younger sounding Zachary takes a look at a much slower speaking Tick-Tock's collection of obscure television broadcast public service announcements. Folks living in downstate New York who are downloading This Week in Amateur Radio International Podcast Edition #183 may recognize the music used in the RAT promo from "Don't Cross the Street in the Middle of the Block" and "Like Father Like Son", two public service announcements that aired on TV stations back in the 1960's.

In the QSL promo, a then much younger Zach speaks over the two meter radio to a now much older Bryannah about This Week in Amateur Radio reception reports and in this week's BLOG promo, a now much older Zach hangs with the fail-to-launch Cigman talking about fast cars and hot chicks. "Fast cars and hot chicks? What else is there?" Cigman Krasnov c. 2008.