Mon Dec 27, 2010 8:13 pm
You know, it is possible to run just the oscillator module separately from the rest of the unit. I've had one running in my garage now for about the past year or so, hooked to two mid-grade stereo speakers in small cabinets. You can use a 24VDC power cube (2A - one I use is for an old Compaq computer docking station) to run the whole works and you get very good output. I modified the tones on mine to be in sync with a dual-tone Thunderbolt, also I lowered the cutoff frequency somewhat, which you wouldn't do with a normal unit. All adjustments I did can be made on the motherboard. To sync the tones with the Tbolt tone frequencies, I just used an external tone generator set for the proper max high tone frequencies from the manual and then zero-beat the output from the card accordingly. It'd be very easy to tie the whole thing into a RCA output with left channel/right channel to plug into any kind of sound system you want. Probably sorta similar to what Federal did with the EIWS setup to interface to a building PA system.
Any of the plug-in modules work well out from the Selectone series horns for the 7th position. I've got the Westminster Chime module still in mine, but I've run slow whoop as well as a few others. Federal also has a recordable module they make (put your own tones on!) now as well as the 32-tone variety. I've thought about ordering one, and shipping them one of my navy WAV files out of the AN/SIA-114B system to burn into the module....
Lot of possibilities with the correct interfaces... my module came from an EBAY purchase of a controller cabinet about 2 years ago, stripped the rest of it to populate another unit that had some bad power modules.
Eric