ham-parrot

Voice keyer for ham radio contests. Runs as a long-lived CLI: proxies your microphone straight to the radio the whole time, and when you press Enter it plays back a pre-recorded voice sequence over the air (keying PTT via Hamlib rigctld) so you don't have to shout the same CQ / exchange fifty times an hour.

Install

pipx install ham-parrot
# or, for development:
poetry install

Use

ham-parrot \
    --mic-device "USB Audio" \
    --radio-audio-device "USB Audio" \
    --monitor-enable --monitor-device "MacBook Pro Speakers" \
    --hamlib-ptt localhost:4532 \
    --mic-passthrough-level 100 \
    --playback-level 90

Keys, while running:

• r — start recording your voice sequence (mic is muted from the air while recording so you don't stomp on yourself). Press r again to stop; the file is saved as ./recording.wav.
• Enter — key PTT, play recording.wav over the radio (and to your monitor device, if configured), release PTT.
• q or Ctrl-C — quit.

recording.wav in the current directory is auto-loaded on startup, so a contest run is: record once, then hit Enter every time you need it.

If the radio is already transmitting (PTT reads high on rigctld) when you hit Enter, playback is refused so you don't collide with an ongoing over.

Flags

Audio processing

Everything sent to the radio (mic passthrough, playback, pilot) is filtered:

• Butterworth bandpass 100 Hz – 4 kHz (4th order per edge → ~48 dB/octave rolloff), always on.
• Optional 17-band peaking EQ on the ISO 1/3-octave centres, controlled by --eq-json.

The monitor sink is fed the raw source so you can hear what your voice actually sounds like uncoloured; the recording is captured before the filter for the same reason (the shaping happens on-air, not in the file).

Device hints accept: a substring of the OS device name ("USB Audio"), a numeric index (from pactl list short sinks on Linux, or sounddevice's device list elsewhere), or pulse:<name> to force the Pulse path.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.