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Hey, folks:

In setting up for ARRL DX SSB this coming weekend, I've been looking into voice keying from TLF. While the current voice keying option seems to work well with my setup, I also saw VK6FLAB's clever ssbdaemon project, which is a workaround allowing letter-by-letter voice keying. This is a major feature in N1MM+ that allows one to work an entire SSB contest without saying a word, a very appealing proposition for me as my wife somehow doesn't appreciate hearing me shouting random callsigns repeatedly from the basement.

Onno's script provides this function via a hack with cwdaemon's debug mode, which seems to work but has some side effects. TLF has to be in CW mode to do this, which means manually resetting the radio back to SSB after every band change. It also means TLF will log these SSB contacts as CW, and that cwdaemon can't switch to CW keying without restarting. Neither problem is a big deal in a single-mode SSB contest, but in a mixed-mode contest it could be very tricky to get both SSB and CW keying working, and to fix the log file to indicate the correct mode for each QSO afterward.

I'm not much of a C coder, but as I understand it, the current voice keyer system calls the play_vk script, passing a filename pulled from the rules configuration file. If it could instead pass the string from the keyer macro function directly, then putting Onno's file-search algorithm into play_vk would allow it to play files named after arbitrary characters. At least, I think something like that would work.

Regardless of the specific mechanism, I think this would be a great feature that a lot of SSB contesters would appreciate.