US flight instructor since 2010. Haven’t flown in a little while though.
AWOS and ASOS systems (ASOS being slightly more fasisticated) are the automated systems you’ll find at smaller uncontrolled airports; they transmit an automated voice reading the weather on a VHF COM frequency and often link back to the National Weather Service (or however the byzantine soon to be gone series of government agencies that could plausibly be in charge would deal with it) to generate METARs you’ll get from the usual scumbags, and when you see a weather map on the news with the temperatures scattered around, they’re almost all from airport systems, it’s where almost all of the government thermometers are.
A lot of them are decades old and use the sound board method of making a machine talk. Short little clips of a guy saying a word or two played in sequence. I actually prefer them to a lot of the actual voice synths they had in use. For some dumb reason most of them are male voices and fairly deep so they’re down in the noise floor, higher pitched/women’s voices carry on radios better.
ATIS systems will either still be a loop of an actual person’s voice recording, or I started to hear some that had a Stephen Hawking style voice synth that weren’t easy to read back.
US flight instructor since 2010. Haven’t flown in a little while though.
AWOS and ASOS systems (ASOS being slightly more fasisticated) are the automated systems you’ll find at smaller uncontrolled airports; they transmit an automated voice reading the weather on a VHF COM frequency and often link back to the National Weather Service (or however the byzantine soon to be gone series of government agencies that could plausibly be in charge would deal with it) to generate METARs you’ll get from the usual scumbags, and when you see a weather map on the news with the temperatures scattered around, they’re almost all from airport systems, it’s where almost all of the government thermometers are.
A lot of them are decades old and use the sound board method of making a machine talk. Short little clips of a guy saying a word or two played in sequence. I actually prefer them to a lot of the actual voice synths they had in use. For some dumb reason most of them are male voices and fairly deep so they’re down in the noise floor, higher pitched/women’s voices carry on radios better.
ATIS systems will either still be a loop of an actual person’s voice recording, or I started to hear some that had a Stephen Hawking style voice synth that weren’t easy to read back.