I have been wanting to have a way for weather alerts specific to my listening area to be aired without me having to intervene. I have come up with a solution that I wanted to share.
The first part is a SAME code enabled weather receiver. My go to is a Sangean CL-100, but anything that is muted until there is an alert relevant to the programed SAME code will work.
The 2<sup>nd</sup> part is a ducking audio device. The Rolls DU30b is a well built and adjustable.
The audio out from the weather radio goes to the ducking input of the DU30b. The normal audio feed for the station goes to the line input. When a SAME coded alert specific to my county comes on the weather radio, the normal audio is ducked (turned down/muted), and the alert is sent on AM/FM. No software involved, as long as there is power to the weather radio, power to the DU30b, and power to my transmitters the weather alert gets out.
I thought about putting the DU30b between my source and my Stereo Tool box, but decided that was a needles point of failure. The weather radio audio is narrowband so using stereo tool to clean it up would not do much.
Nice Idea
I like your approach to this situation, simple and most likely reliable.
Software solutions can be useful but they also can be a pain to implement. Your solution of using hardware makes sense. I have had problems getting the two audio cards in my system to play nice with each other and the OS so I am designing a simple patch panel by which I can patch inputs and outputs from/to sources and destinations. I believe by doing this I can eliminate one of the sound cards and still have the flexibility I want.
My first Part15 station was built when I was in high school and I built a patch panel between speakers, tape recorder input and output, radio output, and my transmitter. This was simple and worked just fine so I hope to recreate this system.
Neil
Musings
Radio8Z recollects: "My first Part15 station was built when I was in high school, etc."
My first tube kit was already on the air when I was in grade school, estimated 1630 kHz which some radios could just barely hear in the days when 1600 was the top of the dial.
Some guy on another forum actually said, "I can do without the musing," but we like it, right?