2011-08-31

Fort Lauderdale rebanded

The Fort Lauderdale trunked system threw the switch to their new rebanded frequencies 15 MHz below their original assignments. That's why my Mixer Board feed has been suspiciously quiet this morning.

I will bang in the new freqs to all my scanners and get things reprogrammed as soon as possible today, in between those pesky demands of work.

2011-08-25

Come on Irene

(with apologies to Dexy's Midnight Runners)

It looks like south Florida will be spared the brunt of Hurricane Irene's force, but we will still get a good amount of rain and some wind gusts that could make things a little bit interesting.

I'll be streaming the usual suspects, plus any special event talkgroups related to preparedness that I find.

Bote's Mixer Board carries Fort Lauderdale fire-rescue and Fort Lauderdale beach patrol only now. The City of Pompano recently moved their radio operations over to the Broward County big bruiser trunked system.

Bote's Wild Feed carries much of the public safety traffic in east Broward County, Florida. This includes fire-rescue operations for Oakland Park, Pompano Beach (and beach patrol), Lighthouse Point, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and Hallandale Beach. The others out west can be considered bonus departments. The Wild Feed also carries all 3 Fort Lauderdale police districts and BSO Oakland Park / Lauderdale Lakes channel which is just about right without being crazy busy.

Our thoughts go out to those in the path of this storm.

2011-08-23

Key West feed, power outages

Evidence is mounting that the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) serving the data closet where my Key West feed is located is faulty.

I'm told they had a 5 minute power outage shortly after noon today which explains why my feed was offline tonight when I got home. I use RadioFeed and while it's a great program for scanner feeds I have a sneaking suspicion that the Ethernet switch that connects it to the Internet lost power, which caused RadioFeed to lose its socket. So I can understand the program getting upset about that.

Normally, RadioFeed tries to reconnect if it loses connectivity to the Icecast server. But in this case the rug got yanked out from under it.

I'll be back down there in a few weeks and fix up everything to make it more reliable.

Now, all eyes are on the eye of Hurricane Irene. Watch this space for an announcement of a special feed as I just might put a spare scanner in Boca Raton to monitor fire traffic up that-a-way if Irene chooses to make things interesting for us.

2011-08-21

Key West and NQX

Bote's Southernmost Feed is focused on the Boca Chica Naval Air Station today to discover the purposes for the unknown talkgroups that I have logged thus far.

I'll probably open it back up to the usual scan list tonight or tomorrow, depending on how much traffic the Navy base gives us.

Watch out later this week for Hurricane Irene as she might pay a visit to the Keys or southeast Florida. Either way I'm sure all 3 of my feeds will be hopping as public safety officials prepare for a tropical system.

2011-08-06

Key West feed restored

The Southernmost Feed is restored to service. I had to replace the battery in the u.p.s. since it was toast and the power in Key West is marginal at best.

In the meantime, I had shut off the feed computer for the other two feeds and forgot to turn it back on before leaving for EYW, so they are off until tonight. Sorry.