Introducing Parrrot - a software parrot for TRX without built in ones (BETA available)

I have a portable rig I use for POTA activations, the Yaesu FT-857D. I love it to death, but it has one flaw: No voice parrot. And if the conditions aren't great and I have to call for a bit, that'll f... up my voice pretty good.

Of course there are some hardware mods to the microphone, where the parrot lives inside the microphone - but then you only have 1 memory bank and a modified mic.

Most of the time, I run my FT857D with a Digirig connected to a laptop of some sort (mostly a Surface Go Tablet or my Macbook) with FLRig to get cat control for frequency logging.

This is where my idea was born: Why not do a software parrot? Available for Windows, Mac AND Linux?

Parrrot was born!

Prerequisites: A running FLRig instance for CAT control, as well as an audio line out of some sort to your rig.

In Parrrot, you can choose your output device, set the volume, pause between TX cycles and freely choose what sound file you wanna transmit (mp3 or wav format).

If you click "Play", Parrrot will contact FLRig, set the mode from (for example) "normal" USB to "USB-D" and then play your sound file. After TX, it will switch back to USB. It will do that as long as you don't press Stop.

This way, you can have a whole variety of pre-recorded CQ calls you can freely choose from.

In accordance to the ham spirit, this software (like any of my software e.g. hamawardz or coordinatorr), will go open source on github. Planned release date is September 2025.

Until then, if you would like to try this piece of software as a beta tester, you can fetch the latest beta installer built for your plattform on my nextcloud. Any kind of feedback is welcome via my email.

Thank you for sticking with me and (maybe) having interest in my software.

See you on the air, where my voice is not cracking from calling CQ for 40min straight ;)

73 de Stefan, DB4SCW