We use Motorola XBR3500s here.
We have some automated announcements we’d like to go out over the radios, coming from a PC.
Is there a basestation or a cable that would allow us to play them over the radios?
You could do this with a base station, or even bodge a cable to use a portable, but the snag is putting the unit into TX - the computer needs to be able to do this - so that adds a bit of complication. You could knocks something home-brew up - two channel recording, audio on one and maybe a tone on the other, then a small circuit to produce a contact closure when the tone is detected.
Are you already using a repeater? If so you could probably add this to the manual talk input on the repeater - but it could confuse things if you are doing clever things with your time slots and need the announcement on more than one effective channel.
What exactly is the scenario?
We just need to have an alert go out on one channel. We have staff roaming a large area, and we get alerts for specific areas, I just want the location to broadcast whenever an alert goes off so staff can converge there.
I tried making a cable, but I ran into that problem, I ended up using two sound cards, having the tone out one, the audio out the other, never did get it to work.
I don’t understand why this doesn’t seem to be a thing at all, there doesn’t seem to be any commercial product that just does this natively (atleast ive found). Radios are not my strong suit, but it just seems like a no brainer thing to want.
How did you put the radio into TX? On a radio with VOX capability, then you could do it by recording the alert with a starting tone - which would work, but your radio doesn’t have VOX, does it? If it does, then it is a very simple job to interface the computer to the radio - just a small circuit to optimise levels and impedances.
The alert is going to be a location; via text to speech, so something recorded doesn’t work.
I cut apart a cable with a push button, and applied voltage over that wire when audio was being played.