Trackstreamer - Streaming Scanner Audio

Above.net Routing trouble

2012-01-04T16:29:00.000-05:00

traceroute shows that packets are not getting from AT&T to the colostreaming.com server. They are dying somewhere in Dallas on the network of above.net

Since my feeds originate from AT&T dsl links they are down for the count. No e.t.r. so keep trying to see what's up when it's up. I'll post here when I know more.

UPDATE: Fixed! AT&T dsl customers can now reach colostreaming.com so we are back in bidniss.

Motorcycle charity ride Saturday morning

2011-12-02T22:43:00.001-05:00

The Police Officer Assistance Trust (P.O.A.T.) will ride their motorcycles from the Doral section of Miami down the Keys to Holiday Isle resort in Islamorada on Saturday morning, December 3, 2011

Expect traffic on Monroe County sheriff main channel as US 1 is Main Street down the Keys and intersections will be closed by deputies as the motorcade makes its way south.

SMART Ride 8 Miami to Key West

2011-11-19T11:33:00.001-05:00

S.M.A.R.T. Ride 8 completes the second half of its run from Miami to Key West today. Bicyclists should be arriving in Key West between noon and 14:00 or so.

I've trimmed back the Southernmost Feed to focus on public safety stuff, although there is no official police escort nor road closures. There might be EMS calls for riders in distress so listen for unusual radio traffic concerning this ride.

USCG digital channels added to Key West scanner feed

2011-11-17T07:48:00.001-05:00

I finally got off my duff and added a block of about 45 digital channels used by the United States Coast Guard. I was reminded to do this by hearing activity on them over my mobile scanner yesterday during an emergency visit to Key West.

I don't know how often they're used, but it should provide an additional aspect on radio activity in Key West.

I just had to reboot the feed computer because RadioFeed had crashed, most likely because I was handling the computer yesterday doing some maintenance. If you just leave things alone they keep running along just fine.

So now I'm going to enjoy the morning with a Cuban American from Cuban Coffee Queen and sit back to listen to my feed.

Enjoy!

FtL Marathon and SuperBoat Races

2011-11-13T04:15:00.001-05:00

Busy Sunday today: Fort Lauderdale is hosting a 13.1 KM half-marathon that begins at 06:13 from in front of the Arts Institute down on SE 17th Street Causeway. Police operations are on Special Event 1 / 4A which is talkgroup 29968 decimal. I'll probably set up my Mobile Feed to stream the special event talkgroup for your listening humor.

Meanwhile, down in Key West will be the final race day for the cigarette boats participating in the SuperBoat races. Let's hope nobody dies today. I'll adjust my Southernmost Feed to weed out the other traffic and focus on Key West.

Enjoy!

Server move

2011-11-11T10:41:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: 12:03 - it must have returned to service while I was on the road because everything is online now. It turns out that one of the hard drives had failed and the other in the RAID array was not rebuilding properly, so they moved us to their ESXi platform which is newer and better anyway.

The SuperBoat races have resumed and I have opened up group 3 in the Marine bank since that contains channel 78 which is the race coordination channel. Enjoy.

14:50 - a boat wrecked and capsized at speed. 2 adult males were transported to Lower Keys Medical Center, one with c.p.r. in progress, the other is alert and talking.

***

Our collocation host have taken it upon themselves to move our server without prior notice. As a result, all my scanner streams will be down until that is complete. No estimated time to repair, just keep trying back every few hours I guess.

SuperBoat races in Key West

2011-11-09T10:31:00.001-05:00

This week marks the 31st Annual Key West powerboat races. The complete schedule is available at that linked web site. Key West harbor is closed at certain times to accommodate the vessels involved in the races so you'll hear communications related to that.

Don't forget this is going on as the military is conducting its exercises just up the road at Boca Chica Naval Air Station. Never a dull moment down the Keys!

Exercise Vigilant Shield 12

2011-11-08T22:05:00.000-05:00

Exercise Vigilant Shield 12 is underway at Boca Chica Naval Air Station, callsign NQX, this week. It involves Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and U.S. Coast Guard assets.

I have heard a small flurry of new talkgroups on the NQX trunked system, most likely related to this. I have the NQX and Monroe County trunked systems in search mode full time so that I can catch new talkgroups as they pop up, but I might activate the aircraft bank and lockout Key West airport stuff to see if we can snag any military comms. We'll see about that.

Read all about it in the Keys News.

Miami Dolphin's 2011 Cycling Challenge

2011-11-06T08:54:00.000-05:00

Bicyclists will be hitting A1A and connecting roads this morning for a benefit ride that runs from West Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale. In fact, there are two separate rides with the one in Fort Lauderdale joining up with the West Palm group at Sunrise Blvd and A1A.

Strong winds are generating high surf so between the surfers and bicyclists A1A should see quite a bit of activity today.

Fort Lauderdale police are using channel 1C for their special detail operations so I'll stream that on my Mobile Feed as long as possible, although I can't guarantee I'll have any bandwidth this afternoon to maintain it.

Keep an ear on the Mixer Board for fire calls relating to the Dolphins ride.

FtL Boat Show

2011-10-27T12:40:00.000-04:00

The Fort Lauderdale Boat Show runs from today through Monday at Bahia Mar out on the beach and at the Broward County Convention Center. Fort Lauderdale fire department has established a special event command post at the boat show and operates on fire tactical channel D.

They've already had a guy fall into the water, but he got back on dry land and they checked him out and declared him healthy.

Monitor Bote's Mixer Board to hear all the fire department festivities. FtL police district 1 covers the beach out on A1A now in case you hear them on Bote's Wild Feed.

UPDATE 2011.10.28 15:00 - Fort Lauderdale police have switched the units working the boat show detail over to channel 4A Special Events 1 during the peak times of the boat show. I can't guarantee anything, but I'll try to stream it as much as possible on my Mobile Feed.

I can guarantee that I will NOT be streaming it during game 7 of the World Series tonight since I will be chatting on my laptop with other primates during the game. Until about 20:00 tonight it should be up, although that special event traffic isn't all that scintillating if you ask me.

Fantasy Fest in Key West

2011-10-22T00:06:00.003-04:00

This weekend marks the start of festivities surrounding Fantasy Fest in Key West, Florida. It runs through the big culmination next weekend just before Hallowe'en.

Quoth the founder:

We need a fest, a carnival, a celebration, something that will entice people to change our moribund season to one of great fun; a party that will bring many people to understand that this season is one of our best.

And so it began.

In recent years more people have heard about it who think it's just a jolly good excuse to get shit-faced and act like asses, which is where my Key West scanner feed comes in. The police are there basically to ensure that nobody gets hurt, but there are always those who over-imbibe and start fights and steal stuff from revelers. Between those police calls and the inevitable ambulance calls for falling down drunks and minor injuries, the feed will be a-hopping.

I have trimmed back the maintenance and operations talkgroups on the Boca Chica (NQX) Naval Air Station so you hear the fire and security talkgroups. I'm quite confident that there will be at least a few interactions between Naval police and Fantasy Fest partyers since Truman Annex and the Trumbo Point complex sit within the city limits of old town Key West. The Boca Chica part of the naval air station is some 10 miles out of town, but shares that same government P25 trunked system.

Lots of mariners gravitate towards Key West for Fantasy Fest, as well, so the marine channels should be hopping with Key West Bight, Galleon, Conch Harbor, A & B marinas shucking and jiving to find space for water-borne visitors.

Never a dull moment in Key West! Stay tuned.

UPDATE 2011.10.28 - Key West police are using tac 2 as the special event channel for Fantasy Fest. I also opened up the scanner bank containing GMRS and MURS frequencies since some of the vendors use them.

Planned outage

2011-10-12T09:28:00.002-04:00

NEVER MIND. ALL OPERATIONS NORMAL NOW. Disregard below message.

Both the Mixer Board and Wild Feed will be down late this afternoon for about an hour. They should be back up no later than this evening.

Check back to have a listen. If you hear the Syncopated Clock you'll know they are still down. I'll update this blog entry when they are back up for good.

Changes to Deerfield, BSO district 5

2011-10-01T22:44:00.001-04:00

Deerfield Beach fire has surrendered and joined Broward County. Their fire fighters were sworn in Friday morning and now operate off Broward fire Dispatch 2 talkgroup, along with every other department already on there. They use the same tactical and car-to-car channels as everybody else on Dispatch 2. No word yet on what will become of their little trunked system, but at last report even Deerfield lifeguards were rumored to be moving over to Event 4 or Event 5 on the Broward system, which would leave the old Deerfield system devoid of users.

On the police side, Broward Sheriff's Office district 5 serving the unincorporated wild, wild west of Fort Lauderdale will move to BSO channel 7A to join Oakland Park and Lauderdale Lakes cops already there. Expect traffic on that channel to double as there is no end to the crime and punishment in district 5.

You might recall that it used to be districts 5 and 12 together on channel 6A before the great refarming a year or so ago. It looks like we couldn't stand the prosperity.

Data center routing trouble

2011-09-21T18:49:00.002-04:00

All of my feeds, and a whole bunch of other stuff, are unreachable on account of a routing problem in the data center hosting these feeds. They're working on that now, 11:04

When the feeds come back, you will know things are back to normal.

Key West scanner feed outages

2011-09-18T18:05:00.001-04:00

The battery bank feeding the UPS in Key West had lost a lot of electrolyte so the power outages were taking out the DSL modem. Better batteries are on order, but for now the existing batteries have been topped off and hopefully will carry the load until the new ones arrive.

The way RadioFeed works, once the computer loses connectivity on its LAN port it doesn't recover. I really should put an Ethernet switch between the computer and the DSL modem to solve that problem, but that will be done on the same trip when we install the new batteries. We should be good for now, though.

Key West Poker Run

2011-09-17T07:46:00.002-04:00

Another Key West Poker Run started Thursday-ish and continues through this weekend. Motorcyclists ride from Miami to Key West collecting a playing card at each checkpoint. When they get to Key West they compare their hands to see who wins. It supports the charities listed in the linked article (above).

The Southernmost Feed should be interesting this weekend. Enjoy.

Fort Lauderdale rebanded

2011-08-31T12:44:00.003-04:00

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.

Come on Irene

2011-08-25T04:59:00.001-04:00

(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.

Key West feed, power outages

2011-08-23T22:36:00.003-04:00

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.

Key West and NQX

2011-08-21T15:41:00.003-04:00

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.

Key West feed restored

2011-08-06T07:58:00.000-04:00

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.

Pompano Beach fire moves to Wild Feed

2011-07-31T12:14:00.005-04:00

Owing to the overwhelming popularity of Bote's Wild Feed, Pompano Beach Fire dispatch has moved operations to Broward County fire Dispatch 5 which is served by the Wild Feed. No longer will you hear Pompano fire on Bote's Mixer Board, only Fort Lauderdale fire as well as the lifeguards for both those cities (as long as I can stand it, anyway).

Pompano fire will mix it up with the other Broward fire departments on their existing 3 tactical talkgroups, plus the 12-zone talkgroups for mutual aid interoperability when needed.

Additionally, Lighthouse Point, Sea Ranch Lakes, and Lauderdale by the Sea fire departments will join Pompano Beach fire officially on 1 August, 2011 at 06:00 since they all abut each other in the northeast corner of the county.

The law enforcement agencies for all those jurisdictions will consolidate their operations on a handful of talkgroups on the Broward County system as well. I have no plans to carry their police traffic, just making note of it to document it.

More info as it arrives. I will post the updated channel lineup on my personal web site About Bote's feeds, clickable in the pane to the right.

Key West feed down

2011-07-21T09:27:00.000-04:00

The Southernmost Feed is down, I don't know why and have no estimated time to repair.

Sorry about that. I'll post here when it's back up.

Key West swim race

2011-06-18T12:01:00.004-04:00

Marine channel 12 is hopping today with the FKCC Swim Around Key West.

Here's the whole scoop right from the horse's mouth:
http://www.fkccswimaroundkeywest.com

Happy monitoring!

NAS Key West added

2011-06-18T11:58:00.002-04:00

I have added the Naval Air Station Key West trunked system to the Southernmost Feed. Several times while visiting Key West I have seen the Naval fire department running a call and wondering where they were going. Now this adds the missing piece to the puzzle.

The NAS police and other talkgroups are carried on the system, so if they get too chatty I might disable them and keep the fire channel. We shall see about that.

Key West audio GREATLY improved

2011-06-12T15:28:00.003-04:00

At long last I have contacted the author of the Virtual Audio Cable utility and he directed me to check my settings to increase the audio level. I did that and now I can declare my Southernmost Feed up to snuff.

Since the audio level varies so widely between the VHF marine channels and the Monroe County digital trunked system I am using a compressor plug-in for WinAmp to add more punch to the audio on the Key West feed. V.A.C. allows me to loop the audio through WinAmp entirely in software, but it was costing me a loss of 12dB which made it sound pathetic again.

I experimented with the settings and it sounds listenable now with no additional amplification on your end. I also reduced the drive on Volume Logic so that it doesn't sound so processed and artificial. So enjoy!

For those interested in the technical details I started V.A.C. control panel and observed all the settings that ScannerCast uses to play out the stream. Then I entered those exact settings into the Cable Parameters section and saved them to the driver by clicking Set. I used SR=44100 (sample rate), BPS=16 (bits per second), NC=1 (channels).

Be sure to stop ScannerCast or whatever plays out the V.A.C. stream before you try to save it or you'll have to type it all over again. Fire up your player or streaming software, then fire up WinAmp to feed the processed audio to it and enjoy the punchiness.

Schooner Wharf Wrecker's Cup race

2011-04-24T12:56:00.002-04:00

Schooner Wharf bar sponsors a regatta in several parts each year named the "Wrecker's Cup". One instance is being held today starting at 13:00 with operations on marine channel 68.

Alternate listen links

2011-04-14T11:10:00.004-04:00

I have added alternate links to listen to my feeds in the sidebar to make it easier for you. Everybody's computer is configured differently so there is no way for me to know what will work on any one computer. For example, on my computer the standard links that end with .m3u do nothing so I originally posted the clean links without that extension.

Now you have a selection. If you click on Bote's Mixer Board (FLL) and it doesn't start your player, then click the one below it with the m3u and see if that works. Most likely it will. It all depends on how your computer is configured and what your favorite player does with it, that's out of my control.

Mixer Board BOLO announcements

2011-03-29T16:03:00.003-04:00

For some time I have had a talkgroup that I thought was used only when Fort Lauderdale police would make broadcast announcements to all 3 districts. I recently discovered that was not what it is used for and revamped the setup on the Mixer Board feed.

The Mixer Board still has Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach fire talkgroups in it, but I set up another "system" in the scanner that only listens to the special multi-select talkgroups that are used only when they make these broadcast announcements. You will hear alerts of incidents like stabbings, shootings, police chases, severe weather announcements, and so forth.

These are ONLY ANNOUNCEMENTS. They are infrequent. They are brief. This will not be general police traffic, just alerts to get the attention of all on-duty officers, then they state at the end which district is handling the incident so you can go tune in. In our case my Wild Feed has all 3 FtL police districts on it so you can listen to that for more police action. Many times the police incident you just heard will be followed by the EMS or fire call which also comes right out on the Mixer Board, so it's a hand-in-glove fit.

I also added these same multi-select talkgroups to the Wild Feed, but since that scans police traffic already it can be tied up on, say BSO Oakland Park, during the announcement so you miss it.

If the announcements get to be too much of an annoyance I will change things, but let's see how things work out for now.

Fort Lauderdale BOLO announcements

2011-03-27T13:18:00.000-04:00

I am trying a new service on my Wild Feed to improve awareness of important police calls. I programmed a separate system in the 996 scanner that will only listen to the multi-select calls from Fort Lauderdale and Pompano police consoles.

The scanner does not always handle these calls properly on the standard talkgroup ids, so we will see how this works out. Of course, if the scanner is stuck listening to some other talkgroup yammering away you will still miss these announcements, but at least they will stick out of the crowd better with this new method.

Key West audio improved

2011-03-10T11:57:00.003-05:00

For some reason the audio settings on the Key West feed were set too high. This was making all but the quietest transmissions distorted and boomy sounding.

I tweaked things this morning and set it so that I can live with it. It should improve the clarity of that gawd-awful IMBE audio on the Monroe County digital trunked system, although I'm not a miracle worker and can do only so much.

Bote's Mixer Board improved

2011-03-08T19:39:00.002-05:00

I have eradicated that gawd-awful SimpleCast in favor of the new RadioFeed software by the same folks who wrote ProScan.

Most of the scanner packages out there won't talk to the Uniden BC780 scanner so I was stuck with SimpleCast to get the channel tags into the stream. The problem is that SimpleCast would crash every few days, requiring a reboot which would also interrupt the Wild Feed which is hosted on the same machine.

Now I get my channel tags and hopefully some reliability, too.

I now have to clean up the channel tags in the BC780 scanner because RadioFeed reads them directly out of the scanner. With SimpleCast I had to use Talkgroup Monitor which pulled channel tags from a text file database. This allowed me to get by with tags that mean something to me, but not to the listener. I'll take care of that over the coming days.

Bote's Mobile Feed testing in one place

2011-03-05T10:23:00.003-05:00

I purchased a Griffin iMic for my laptop since its built-in audio subsystem is fried. This allows me to uplink my scanner feed from wherever my laptop and scanner are.

As a fun test I'm going to be using my Mobile Feed mount point to stream whatever is interesting at the moment. If you listen with WinAmp you can view the channel tags to determine what you are hearing at any given time. Since the scanner is limited to 16 character channel names, I have to be creative with my abbreviations, but I think you'll be able to figure them out. Unless I specifically state it, the radio systems monitored will be somewhere in the southeast Florida area.

Today I figured I would stream Sunrise, Pembroke Pines, Miramar, and Coconut Creek since I never listen to those zones. If they become annoying I'll shut them off and scan something else. You never know what you'll hear.

Key West feed audio trouble

2011-02-25T21:47:00.001-05:00

UPDATE 2011.02.26 16:49 - The Key West scanner feed has been repaired. I took the opportunity to organize the equipment better so that it's easier to work on and make it more reliable. I replaced the audio cable with a new one so the audio should be rock solid now.

The feed was offline for about an hour while I moved everything around, but it should stay up for the foreseeable future now.

***

Sorry, there was some work done around the Key West feed computer and it must have moved the audio cable to a bad position. The audio is weak and garbled right now.

I know how to fix it, I just have to get over there and do it. Sorry for the inconvenience. You can still listen to it, but it aint pretty.

Android streaming players

2011-02-19T12:44:00.001-05:00

So I guess Android doesn't work with the blog site created by its authors? Curious.

I see Android listeners on my statistic logs from time to time.

What Android streaming player are you using to listen to Bote's feeds? I would really like to find one and have not yet.

Thanks!

Dania Fire merges with Broward County

2011-02-07T17:29:00.006-05:00

Dania Beach Fire Department became part of Broward Sheriff Office's Department of Fire and Rescue on January 29, 2011.

The Dania Beach department, Broward's oldest, will become the seventh municipality with BSO Fire Rescue. The others are: Cooper City, Lauderdale Lakes, Pembroke Park, Southwest Ranches, West Park and Weston. BSO Fire Rescue also serves Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and the unincorporated areas of the county.

It is unclear on what final radio channels Dania fire will operate. Since the switch:

Broward Joint Ops 1 (formerly 12A) has been used as an intercom between Broward and Hollywood fire main dispatch for automatic aid (mutual aid) calls;
Broward JOps 2 (12B) has been patched with Hollywood fire dispatch, although the dispatcher's transmissions do not always come through reliably on 12B;
Broward JOps 3 (12C) has been patched with Broward Dispatch 2 (formerly Fire North channel) for Hollywood units running mutual aid into Dania;
Broward JOps 4 (12D) is patched to Hollywood fire tac 1 N for Dania units running mutual aid into Hollywood.

This sounds more confusing than it needs to be, but the situation is fluid and there will likely be changes in the future. Up until this switch Broward would assign any of 12B, 12C, or 12D for fire units to conduct training drills, but these same channels were also used on working incidents for interoperability communications which was confusing. Now when you see JOps 1, 2, 3, or 4 you can assume it has something to do with Dania or Hollywood fire calls.

Dania fire and Hollywood police and fire used to operate on their own separate system that is also a site hung off the Broward trunking zone controller. Since the switch Dania units must be operating on the Joint Ops talkgroups, presumably until they get their radios programmed to add the usual line-up of Broward fire channels.

Hollywood police and fire radio channels remain unchanged, only Dania has moved over to the Broward core system for daily operations.

Tornado watch

2011-01-25T22:56:00.001-05:00

South Florida is under a tornado watch and the strong cold front is barreling through now. Strong gusty winds are knocking out power around the area so the feeds might go down. They'll be back up when FP&L restores power should that happen.

Key West air radio gone

2011-01-23T16:18:00.004-05:00

I locked out the aircraft comms group on the Southernmost Feed. It was talking just a bit too much and most of the traffic was the same: routing via Boca Chica departure, then BAITZ, then CARNU, then direct blah, blah, blah. Sometimes some interesting stuff, but not enough to have it stopping there instead of real interesting stuff on police or fire channels.

We still have Key West police and fire, Monroe County, FLA police and fire, and most marine channels (when they're not being totally obnoxious, that is).

Host down

2011-01-13T03:29:00.004-05:00

The host where our server sits in Dallas is down. No reason nor e.t.r. published.

They posted a note on their Twitter feed about a maintenance window last night, but this unexpected outage started after midnight this morning. It's not just colostreaming.com that is down, I mean the host's own support and main sales web site is kaput! So it's safe to assume that they know about it and are running around like crazy trying to put out the fires to get things back up and running, no need to tell them the obvious.

All of my feeds will return when the host comes back up. Stay warm out there!

UPDATE: VirtBiz had a power main that supplies electricity to part of their colo facility fail on them overnight. It was restored by that afternoon and all our feeds came back up normally. I think they need to give Emerson Liebert a call about a big-ass u.p.s. for their facility; this keeps happening too frequently it seems.

Winterfest Boat Parade

2010-12-11T16:51:00.002-05:00

Fort Lauderdale hosts the annual Winterfest Boat Parade of Lights this evening starting at 18:30 E.S.T. It's a pretty big deal with viewers lining the shore of the IntraCoastal Waterway from Lauderdale up to Pompano Beach.

I have restricted Bote's Wild Feed to SEARCH on the Fort Lauderdale trunked system in case any new talkgroups pop up. You will hear traffic that is not normally heard on that feed for the duration of this special event.

Fantasy Fest Begins

2010-10-24T23:51:00.000-04:00

Fantasy Fest begins in Key West, Florida this week. Expect the EMS and police to be extra busy this week and into next weekend as partyers from all around converge on Key West for body painting, dancing, and assorted drunken travails.

The Key West online scanner stream should be rocking and rolling as next weekend approaches. I have still not solved the problem of the random dropouts, so if the stream stops or goes to the intermission music just start your player again.

Enjoy!

Better Audio Coming

2010-10-13T20:32:00.000-04:00

I have figured out a way to employ the outstanding Volume Logic plug-in for WinAmp to boost the weak sauce audio that digital trunked systems emit.

I have installed the upgrade on the Key West feed just now.

I will install it on the Broward County feeds shortly.

Key West Poker Run

2010-09-17T09:57:00.001-04:00

Poker? I don't even know her!

So this weekend is the Poker Run during which a bunch of party animals ride their motorcycles down U.S. 1 to Key West while picking up poker chips along the way. I don't know what they do with the chips once they get there, but it's a big deal.

I heard the Key West police switch to tatical channel 2 for a detail and it has to be for the Poker Run. To capture any traffic and new talkgroups I have locked out everything else, so no marine nor aircraft traffic for the weekend.

It should be interesting listening. Enjoy!

Key West DSL better

2010-09-15T00:06:00.000-04:00

The Key West feed has been switched to a reliable DSL link from the Comcast cable modem link.

It turns out that Comcast has made no provisions for backup power in Key West, so when the electricity goes out, which it does often, Comcast subscribers lose their Internet connection. It didn't matter that we had a big bruiser UPS battery backup supply running the local equipment because the other end of the link was down when the power went out.

Those days are over. We now have the ability to stay online upwards of several hours. And that's precisely the time when the Key West feed should get pretty interesting.

Broward feeds stabilized

2010-09-02T13:56:00.003-04:00

I have rewired the spaghetti that carries my DSL through my house and went from a marginal 6.0dB signal/noise receive ratio up to 23.0dB s/n as reported by my Westell 6100 DSL modem. The reported data rate is back up to what I am paying for and web pages now load better than dial-up speed. Happy days are here again.

This also means that Bote's Mixer Board and Bote's Wild Feed should be as reliable as they were before the DSL changes took their toll.

One of these days I have to re-install the original machine so that the Mixer Board streamer quits crashing. For now if it crashes I have to intervene manually to restart it. Ya get what ya pay for.

Storms causing DSL outages

2010-08-29T21:03:00.004-04:00

Broward County and south Florida have been getting storms all day long that should continue all night long from the looks of the RADAR.

The DSL has been going down about every 2 to 3 minutes which makes the streaming scanner feeds pretty much useless. By the time they reconnect and resume streaming, the damned DSL goes out again.

Nothing I can do about it until Monday when Shuddern Bell/BellSouth/AT&T wanders back into the office. Sorry about that, chief.

UPDATE 2010.08.30 17:43 - I have placed an order with AT&T DSL to downgrade my DSL service from DSL Ultra 1.5Mbps to DSL Lite 768kbps, but nothing will be done until tomorrow. The thing is out of sync more than it's on right now, so I have just turned off the streaming computer, no sense getting everybody's hopes up. I'll post here when it looks like things have cleared up. If this incessant stream of rain storms quits, that might give some temporary relief as well. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, you might hear some interesting reports from the U.S. Coast Guard on the Key West feed, so don't forget that.

Key West mystery transmissions FOUND!

2010-08-29T07:35:00.002-04:00

For a while I have been hearing hourly voice identifications from the N9LCK repeater in Key West, yet I had the amateur radio group disabled. There might have been a few other stray transmissions that made their way over the Southernmost Feed.

It turns out that the BCD996T scanner got into Uniden's Close Call mode and that repeater was so strong that it triggered Close Call and came through, but without any channel tag information. I used the remote control feature of Freescan to watch it happen in real time and then turned off Close Call.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

Key West power outage

2010-08-25T11:40:00.001-04:00

A big thunderboomy rumbled through the lower Keys late last night and early this morning, knocking out electricity to the feed site.

Even though my own uninterruptible power supply kept the scanner, stream computer, and cable modem running nicely for the hour or so that electricity was out, the p.o.s. Comcast cable Internet service went out almost immediately. A call to Comcast confirmed that they have no backup power for their cable infrastructure in Key West, so when the power goes out, the customers are s.o.l.

Despite Comcast's superior downlink speed an order has been placed with Shuddern Bell/BellSouth/AT&T for a DSL line. At least they make an effort to provide service during a power outage, even if it doesn't last quite as long as stated publicly. Power outages are frequent in Key West so it behooves everybody on the island to plan accordingly.

p.s. I locked out the aircraft guard channel that was stuck on a weak carrier. I opened up the aircraft group yesterday, so we shall see how long it lasts. If it becomes too much trouble I'll just lock it out again.

Back online

2010-08-15T17:04:00.004-04:00

I don't know why, but the feed computer for Bote's Mixer Board and Bote's Wild Feed locked up hard. I was camping this weekend and could not access it remotely, but then I couldn't do anything with it locally either. I had to pull the plug and reset it the old fashioned way.

I gotta get this big UPS outfitted with big batteries and solve all this mess.

Back to normal ops for now, until the next storm rolls through.

Bad storms approaching

2010-08-08T15:32:00.004-04:00

Severe thunderstorms approach southeast Florida as I type this. They were bad yesterday and knocked out electricity which caused the Broward feeds to go down. Because the uninterruptible power supplies here can't run everything (I discovered yesterday) if it looks like power is about to go out the feeds will go offline.

You will probably hear radio traffic that reveals how bad the storms are on the feeds themselves.

Otherwise, things should be almost normal, except that I can only hear Deerfield on the Wild Feed scanner until I get an external antenna up.

Service interruption for Broward feeds

2010-08-01T14:44:00.002-04:00

The Mixer Board and Wild Feeds will be off and on over the coming few days, so please bear with me. I am changing everything around here and outages are simply unavoidable.

If you only get music when you tune in, try back a few hours later because...you never know what you'll hear.

Mixer Board vigilance

2010-06-17T17:02:00.003-04:00

While I am out of town I would appreciate notice if the Mixer Board feed goes down. I can not promise rapid response, but I'll do my best to get things back online as soon as I know it has crapped out again.

I have been procrastinating at regenerating the original machine that hosted that feed. Since the temporary machine hosts both the Mixer Board and the Wild Feed, something does not agree with SimpleCast which encodes the Mixer Board feed so it craps out every few days. I have covered this up by rebooting the machine when I feel that it needs it, but while I'm away it will likely fail when I have no Internet access. Murphy's Law and so forth.

Sorry about this, but you know how hobbies are. Of course, if somebody wants to donate a million bucks to the cause...

Look on the bright side, you can always listen to Key West action on the Southernmost Feed. WOO HOO!

Wild Feed searching

2010-06-11T12:29:00.003-04:00

Broward County is finally getting around to rebanding its trunked radio system Real Soon Now. Since the radios must be returned to the radio shop for reprogramming, they are taking the time to change the names and uses of some talkgroups.

Starting now and lasting through the weekend Bote's Wild Feed will be in SEARCH mode to pick up any random talkgroups that pop up. Over the weekend most of the traffic is public safety as the dog catcher and garbage man don't work then, so our ears will be spared.

I do have to program in all the hospital talkgroups in order to lock them out as that traffic is mundane, annoying, and sometimes contains private information that should not be broadcast.

Server replaced

2010-06-10T16:05:00.004-04:00

Well, that was certainly easier than I anticipated!

The failing server has been replaced with zero effort on my part. Much props to the co-location facility that hosts our streams, VirtBiz Internet Services who can be reached at +1 972-485-4125 or +1 866-485-4125 . They sure made it easy for me, as I did not at all relish the prospect of re-installing Icecast one little bit!

Server failure

2010-06-08T23:42:00.003-04:00

It never fails: as soon as I gussy up the Key West feed, the streaming server takes a dive.

We're told that the server hardware at the co-lo facility is an older box and has several failures creeping up on it. So, over the coming days I will be getting a new server ready. No adjustment to your set is necessary, it will just start working reliably again once the cutover is complete and the DNS entry is updated.

In the meantime, expect more downtime than uptime based on the fact that they got it running a few hours ago, but it's back down again.

Key West feed new antenna

2010-06-05T17:05:00.002-04:00

OH YEAH! Bote's Southernmost Feed from Key West, Florida now hears MUCH better.

It is running a 1/4 wavelength high band antenna up on the roof, so it hears the Key West and Stock Island sites of the Monroe County trunked system solid now.

It also hears the UHF fire repeaters for Monroe County which still have some interesting traffic.

I have also enabled the marine bank since Key West is an island, after all. If the Coast Guard encrypted transmissions become too obtrusive I shall lock them out. For now, everything is wide open on the marine bank.

This feed should be hopping now!

Enjoy!

Key West feed antenna

2010-05-16T00:00:00.003-04:00

I know, I know, the Key West feed signal breaks up a lot. It's just a rinky-dink little rubber duck antenna screwed on the back of the scanner.

I'm hoping to erect a real antenna if I can arrange all the moving parts involved. If it works out the way I hope, then the public safety trunked system should be rock solid and I might be able to open up the marine bank since there will then be something to hear.

Nothing is certain at this point, but bear with me as I improve the feed.

Thanx.

Southernmost Key West feed

2010-04-24T21:34:00.000-04:00

Here we go!

I'm going to give a Key West scanner feed a go. It might not last a month, it might last a long time. We shall see.

The permanent address for the Southernmost feed is
http://colostreaming.com:8000/botekyw

I will record an updated introduction when I get back home to identify the feed. For now, enjoy the silence when you first connect.

The Wild Feed is back to its regularly scheduled program, which will be...nothing. I have no spare scanner to run the Wild Feed now that I sold my extra scanners, so for now I will punt.

Cheers!

Key West test feed

2010-04-23T03:37:00.001-04:00

I am testing a temporary feed at Key West, Florida this weekend. If all goes well, I might make it permanent depending on factors beyond my control.

For now it is scanning both police and fire for the city of Key West as well as Monroe County. Their audio levels vary all over the place and I have done all I can to make it sound listenable.

\If this feed becomes permanent it will move to a different mount point name on the Icecast server at which time I will announce it here. Stay tuned.

Bote's Wild Feed down

2010-04-22T09:53:00.000-04:00

Bote's Wild Feed has been taken out of service. Watch this space for an announcement about this mount point, it might be coming back online in a different location.

Nobody listened to it anyway. Except for you. You know who you are.

I Survived the Great Tornado of 329

2010-03-29T17:58:00.005-04:00

Local channel 10 WPLG news made it sound like Armageddon, going so far as to talk about buildings destroyed as their camera zoomed in on a length of white aluminum gutter lying on the ground. Oh. Boy. Circle the wagons, Martha!!!111!!1

Now that the shouting is over, the police command post monstrosity is no longer parked on NE 5 Terrace at 42 Street in Oakland Park, and the helicopter has gone home, and the water has receded, I have put the scanner feeds back to where they were yesterday.

Bote's Mixer Board scanning Fort Lauderdale, Pompano, and Deerfield Beach fire departments.

Bote's Wild Feed currently in Spring Break mode scanning Fort Lauderdale police districts 1, 2, and 3 (in other words, all of 'em). Nobody seems to care about listening to cops so I guess I'll put that back to Broward fire west channel. I think it's kind of neat to hear the same incident being handled on both the fire and police channels, but I must be in the minority.

If I can manage to get an antenna and feedline up high enough to hear Hollywood's digital system I might stream them instead of Broward, since there are a couple other Broward feeds.

Stormy weather

2010-03-29T08:40:00.002-04:00

Severe thunderstorms moving through southeast Florida with reports of a tornado touchdown in Oakland Park just now.

I noticed my casement windows slam shut with winds suddenly out of the north, then incredibly strong "gusts" lasting 30 seconds or more. I think we dodged a bullet as that might have been the edge of the tornado.

A house is on fire 10 blocks north of me due to downed electrical lines.

Bote's Mixer Board is cut back to just Fort Lauderdale fire. Bote's Wild Feed is still on Ft. Lauderdale police. All public safety agencies are going crazy right now.

My DSL still goes out for 2 minutes or so with strong lightning bolts and sometimes randomly, so if you hear the intermission music just hang in there until the feed comes back up. Or if you wait more than about 5 minutes just restart your stream and it should come back on your end.

Spring Break cops in Ft Lauderdale

2010-03-16T01:06:00.002-04:00

Bote's Wild Feed will be streaming Fort Lauderdale police scanner action for the remainder of March in honor of all the bullet-heads who come down for Spring Break madness.

I should have done this sooner since we are yet 2 weeks into Spring Break, but there's only one of me to go around.

I'll post here when the Wild Feed switches back to Broward County's gripping fire radio action.

Testing dedicated feeds

2010-02-12T14:24:00.002-05:00

Bote's Mixer Board is now scanning only Fort Lauderdale and Deerfield Beach fire departments. Bote's Wild Feed is now scanning only Broward County fire.

Super Bowl Saturday Night Party

2010-02-06T21:32:00.003-05:00

Fort Lauderdale is hosting a shindig on the beach to celebrate Super Bowl 2010 in Miami.

Bote's Mixer Board has the usual fire traffic, which includes the Fort Lauderdale fire department's special events talkgroup tac D.

Bote's Wild Feed has police traffic focused on FtL police and Broward interoperability talkgroup 14D for traffic control during the event and to escort the favored few into and out of the party area.

BSO interop 14i is also active with event traffic. There are likely others, so listen up.

FtL Feed Troubles

2010-01-23T06:00:00.003-05:00

Even after adding a bunch of memory to the feed computer, it is still croaking after a couple of days with the same problem. I thought that Windows was simply running out of resources to wipe its own butt, BUT apparently not.

SimpleCast is what is crashing, but it takes down ScannerCast along with it. I'm going to burn in a new feed computer while I rework the machine that is in trouble.

I apologize for the outages as they are uncharacteristic. I like to run a reliable service and this jes don't cut it. One way or another I will make these feeds reliable once again.

Haiti Earthquake Victims

2010-01-23T05:55:00.003-05:00

Broward County is running frequently to FLL (Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport) to transport victims of the earthquake in Haiti to area hospitals.

It is 05:56 on Saturday morning 23 January, 2010 and they just dispatched a bunch of ambulances from Broward County fire stations, Davie, City of Fort Lauderdale, Oakland Park, and Hollywood to the airport. This has been ongoing for several days and should probably continue into the coming week.

Operations are usually conducted on one of the fire tactical channels, typically tac A.

FtL Maintenance Outage

2010-01-20T12:53:00.004-05:00

Both Bote's Mixer Board and Bote's Wild Feed will be down for maintenance on the feed computer today. The reason the feeds have been dying I believe is due to insufficient main memory in the Dell computer that sends out the feeds. It shouldn't be more than 30 minutes between tearing everything apart, installing the new chip, and hooking it all back together again.

UPDATE: 16:30 - ALL DONE! Now I have to watch the streaming machine over the coming days to see if it still wigs out. If both the Mixer Board and Wild Feed die simultaneously you'll know it's the same problem recurring.

Feeds consolidated

2010-01-13T00:01:00.003-05:00

In case you were wondering why all the weirdness on Bote's Mixer Board and Bote's Wild Feed tonight, I was consolidating both streams onto one streaming computer. Until now the Wild Feed had been running on my main desktop machine as proof of concept. But, this proved inconvenient when I had to reboot or make recordings that would interfere with that feed.

You should not notice any change on your end, but if something is amiss please let me know.

bote.prodigy@gmail.com

Happy New Year!

BSO refarms talkgroups

2009-12-28T20:10:00.000-05:00

Broward Sheriff's Office has refarmed its police talkgroups as of day shift this morning. Although it was little more than musical channel names, it did require us to reprogram the labels in our scanners so that we know who is talking at a glance.

They also regrouped some districts, which pleases me to no end. No longer must I listen to the incessant lawless antics from District 5; they stayed on 6A while Oakland Park moved to 7A along with Lauderdale Lakes, a kinder, gentler neighborhood.

So listen for a less rambunctious sound on Bote's Wild Feed from now on.

Note well that I hope to combine the Wild Feed onto the same machine as the Mixer Board feed so there will be some downtime while I move things around here over coming days.

I hope to have even more good news in the New Year!

Moving to Icecast streams

2009-12-22T13:08:00.006-05:00

Watch for the existing streams to move to the new Icecast server. I'm hoping to get things cutover during the coming days, but the Christmas holiday will no doubt delay that plan.

With Icecast, everything starts with the same basic URL and port number. The exact feed name follows the trailing slash, which gives you a name that can be remembered rather than a port number. It will look like
http://colostreaming.com:8000/feed_name

Find the new listen links in the panel on the left under the heading "Listen".

Read the latest descriptions of what is on each feed on my static streaming audio page under "Read" on the panel to the left.

I will run the old Shoutcast stream with an announcement for a time to make sure that stragglers get the message.

I will also be adding a couple feeds so watch for those.

A-line trip a success

2009-12-20T22:36:00.003-05:00

I declare my A-line return trip to Florida a success. I saw some neat trainage in Jax, chased some trains up and down the A-line in Saint Stephens, South Carolina, and generally proved that the concept of mobile streaming has merit.

Now, I rest.

CSX mobile scanner feed down the A-line

2009-12-18T01:23:00.028-05:00

I'm heading south to return to Florida starting Friday evening, hoping to beat the snow storm that is heading to the mid-Atlantic region. The air card coverage will be spotty so there will be dropouts. But if I know of a cool meet or other neatness I have the option of finding a good location for both the railroad scanner to hear it and the air card to stream it to your streaming audio player.

Listen link:

http://colostreaming.com:8000/botemobile.m3u

When I'm streaming you will hear silence or radio chatter. When I am not streaming or am out of range of the mobile data network you will hear a brief announcement followed by music. You can just let it run and when the music stops you'll know I'm back in range.

I've even figgered out the Google Latitude Badge gadget. It might even be accurate this trip! Watch this space for updates as I can't cover lots of mailing lists and web boards.

Travel log follows the map snippet below.

Bote's A-line Travelog

2009.12.18
15:25 here I go!

22:43 mp A64 Emporia, VA resuming southbound move after taking my bean; sleet falling.

2009.12.19
01:43 mp A120 Rocky Mount, N.C. overnight, streaming CSX railroad radio on the A-line until I resume my southward movement tomorrow morning.

12:15 back on the road, pointed south along US 301 to Kenly, N.C. then south to South of zee Border.

14:20 Selma, N.C. Q438 rumbled north across the NS diamond with a train of dead loads and a cool-looking blue Pan Am Railways boxcar about halfway into the consist.

17:45 Florence, S.C. rest stop and awaiting promised trainage.

19:30 Florence, S.C. well, colostreaming.com has decided to take an unauthorized vacation, so my feed is down until that is repaired. Unknown e.t.r. so you can follow me on the map and watch for OS reports on the lists where they are appropriate. It figures. The thing worked for months and months, but craps out right in the middle of my most awesome A-line railfanning journey. :-(

23:00 Lane, S.C. Icecast server is back up so I shall resume streaming railroad scanner audio from my automobile journey south to Florida. I saw Q174-19 and P098 at Lane connection 30 minutes ago. More to come northbound.

23:15 Lane, S.C. P089 met P052 at downtown Lane.

23:55 Q492?? (167, 452) north by Cross Jct and Saint Stephens with a fair amount of dead loads.

2009.12.20
00:10 Q182-19 (7718, 5288) "movin like a train" north by Cross Jct and Saint Stephens with a few piggly wigglies in tow.

00:27 Q493-19 (7903, ????) south by Cross Jct and Saint Stephens with dead loads.

04:40 Savannah Amtrak station, mp A 490.7 with 3G signals so enjoy listening to what little trickles across the feed.

07:20 Leaving Savannah Amtrak station for I-95 southbound. Not much doing on Nahunta nor Jesup subs so the stream will be off until Jacksonville.

11:15 Jacksonville, FL I'll stream what little there is to hear around Dinsmore and Moncrief yards, but on a Sunday it's pretty thin on ATCS. I'm tired and wanna go home, so if nothing's shaking I won't hang around long.

11:40 NS 226? pulled auto racks across the Jax drawbridge on a transfer job to F.E.C. Bowden yard.

12:10 NS 209 pulled a very short cut of pigs over the Jax drawbridge on a transfer job to F.E.C. Bowden yard.

12:15 CSX Y108 gets permission to leave Bowden to return to CSX Moncrief yard across the Jax drawbridge. This is the first time I have found the perfect spot to witness this up close and personal, and I am rewarded with 3 jobs in less than 1 hour!

12:26 CSX Y108 with 2 butthead switchers pulls 8000 feet of juicy juice reefers and pigs north across Jax bridge while NS 275 pulls a lot more piggies south into Bowden yard. Make that *5* (FIVE!) jobs in less than one hour! WOW!

13:48 OK, enough is enough. I'm pointing the car south and heading for the barn. Whatever I scan is what will be on the stream, if I stream any more. It's probably not of interest to most railfans as the closer I get to home the more public safety (fire) comms you will hear.

Merry Christmas!

McLean Relay Station's last days

2009-12-14T22:26:00.008-05:00

I hooked up the McLean Relay Station to my Icom 3210 on the railroad channels while I am here. It won't last long, but you can hear trains on the lower part of the CSX Metropolitan sub (B&O) between Gaithersburg and NE D.C. as well as the upper RF&P sub between Virginia Avenue and RO (Rosslyn) with spotty coverage of Franconia Hill which is a pretty high spot.

Next week I'm taking it down for good. It's a crappy receive location, the equipment just will not work reliably here despite my best efforts, and other factors tell me that its day is over.

Listen link:
http://colostreaming.com:8106/listen.pls

Enjoy while it lasts.

Bote

Auto Train Tracker map

2009-12-13T14:04:00.026-05:00

Below was a map that showed my location on the Auto Train, but has been removed due to it being outdated.

I am streaming scanner audio live, but there are frequent dropouts even though we are sitting dead still in Sanford terminal. If you get the music for too long, just disconnect your player and reconnect. If the stream is back you should start hearing it immediately; if not, you will hear more lovely Syncopated Clock by Larry Anderson to while away the time.

Auto Train Log

15:46 Pull north, 38 cars, 247 passengers, 113 vehicles of all types

15:50 P052-13 on the main at Sanford

17:20 Clear signal, West Tocoi, FL

17:37 Clear signal, Solite, FL

17:58 approach medium, McDuff Street, Jax, FL

18:03 medium clear, Duke's Crossing, Jax, FL

18:47 clear signal, downtown Folkston, GA

20:29 defect detector, mp A501.8, Savannah, GA (back in air card range!)

22:11 clear signal, North Charleston, SC

23:25 meet P053-13 at Coward, SC

23:50 crew change, Florence, SC

00:12 depart Florence, SC on a clear signal, Bakery

01:45 Fayetteville, NC

02:34 clear signal, North Smithfield, NC

05:15 clear signal, Walthall, Chester, VA

05:26 clear signal, Broad Rock Rd, Richmond, VA

05:48 clear signal, Elmont

06:42 approach limited, FB, Fredricksburg, VA

07:15 arrive Lorton Auto Train facility, awaiting ground crew to arrive

Auto Train P052 live streaming

2009-12-12T17:10:00.005-05:00

If the good Lord's willin and the crick don't rise, I hope to stream my railroad scanner directly from my sleeper berth on the Auto Train starting tomorrow afternoon.

I have tested it here in my shack and it works great. Assuming that my air card has reasonable coverage along the A-line you should hear everything that I hear: signal calling, defect detectors, maintenance-in-the-way foremen clearing the train through their limits, passing trains, dispatcher communications, everything.

If I get really lucky and figure out how to plot my position on Google maps that would be the cherry on the icing on the cake. That's not looking promising right now, though.

So tune in Sunday afternoon, 13 December, 2009 for Bote's Mobile Feed and enjoy!

The listen link is:
http://colostreaming.com:8000/botemobile.m3u

If clicking doesn't work, copy and paste the link into your audio player--this always works.

Fort Lauderdale boat parade feed

2009-12-12T16:53:00.003-05:00

Fort Lauderdale's annual Boat Parade of Lights down the New River and up the Intracoastal Waterway shoves off at 18:00 tonight, Saturday, 12 December, 2009.

I have set up this special secondary feed off my mixer board to stream public safety and support traffic related to the boat parade from the FtL trunked sytem. Sometimes it can be quite entertaining.

Listen to the feed in WinAmp, VLC, iTunes, Windows Media Player, and probably others. It is an mp3 stream at 16kbps so it should not burden your dial-up or mobile link too much.

The listen link is:
http://colostreaming.com:8000/botemixer2.m3u

If clicking doesn't tell your computer to do the Right Thing, then copy and paste the link into your player--that always works.

ScannerCast ROCKS!

2009-12-12T14:55:00.006-05:00

ScannerCast is the perfect encoder utility for anyone wanting to stream scanner audio to the Internet. It is written by Peter, K1PGV and does exactly what a scanner feed needs.

First, if you plan to (or already) stream through RadioReference.com then once your feed is configured there, ScannerCast can automatically pull down your feed parameters and set it up locally for you.

If you send up your own wild feed through a Shoutcast or Icecast server the standard fields allow you to name the feed and create a fixed tag.

If you want to send your scanner's channel name to the feed, it does that directly off your computer's serial port, no hassle. ScannerCast currently knows how to parse data from Uniden 396T and 996T scanners as well as GRE PSR-500 and PSR-600 (which are OEM to Radio Shack as PRO-106 and PRO-197 lines).

In a pinch ScannerCast can act as the audio server itself, sending out packets directly from your own computer to as many listeners as tune in up to the limit that you configure in the software.

You must install MicroSoft .NET Framework versions 2, 3, or 3.5 to perform the behind-the-scenes work for ScannerCast, but this is used by many other packages as well these days.

The audio encoding is fixed at 16 kilobits/second bit rate and 22.050 KHz sample rate. This is an uncommon combination for music streams, the purpose for which most stream encoders are designed, but it's fine for communications-quality audio.

If you want to employ introductory and fallback messages in your feed, the recordings must match the format of the stream. I have found that the DOS command line utility LAME.EXE converts just about any audio file format to anything, so look for that.

Oh, the best part about ScannerCast is that it is FREE! No cost to set up your own scanner feed with this encoder.

Icecast ROCKS!

2009-12-12T14:45:00.005-05:00

I have wrestled Icecast version 2.3.2 onto the linux box that hosts my feed(s) and really like how much better it is for me and my listeners.

If the feed is not streaming when you hit it, it plays you the fallback message instead of just bombing out. It also has less latency between when the live audio gets encoded and when it trickles out your speaker, which is important for live scanner feeds like this.

The format of the feed link is different: instead of each feed having its own i.p. port number, it has a memorable name after the fixed port number. So the feed link will always be colostreaming.com:8000/ with the 'mount point' as the feed name after it.

My long-time Fort Lauderdale scanner feed will be /botemixer and my mobile feed on long road trips will be /botemobile . This makes it much easier to remember and to figure out what the feed might be from the name of the mount point.

In the coming weeks, probably after New Years, I will cut over all my feeds to Icecast. They will still stream in mp3 format so you can continue to use WinAmp, VLC, iTunes, or Windows Media Player to listen. I will announce here in writing and in spoken word on each feed in preparation for the cutover.

McLean Relay Station gone

2009-11-12T02:41:00.002-05:00

The McLean Relay Station is offline, likely permanently. An extended power failure depleted the UPS battery and it did not come back on when power was restored.

While investigating the streams available from Linsday Blanton's RadioReference site, I discovered one each for Fairfax County, MWAA, and Arlington County, all of which were covered by my feed.

So, because it is redundant, has poor scanner receive signal, and is loathed by the site host (dear old Dad) I am pulling it out of service on my next visit.

We thank you for your support.

Bote's Boca Box gone

2009-09-01T15:29:00.002-04:00

As promised, Bote's Boca Box streaming Boca Raton, Delray, and Boynton public safety is gone.

It might resurface in a different location if I can find one of interest.

Reliable DSL(?)

2009-07-31T15:01:00.002-04:00

At the risk of jinxing things, after two weeks it looks like the new DSL circuit is actually reliable!

A thunderstorm rumbled through yesterday and...nothing happened. I couldn't believe it!

I'll keep a weather eye on it, but Bote's Mixer Board should now be solid with Fort Lauderdale area fire radio scanner traffic.

We thank you for your support.

Bote's Mixer Board online

2009-07-22T10:45:00.004-04:00

Bote's Mixer Board is back online on the new DSL circuit.

We shall see how long it takes until *THIS* one fails. I see some thunderboomies on the RADAR advancing into Georgia so we might know within 24 hours or so.

Enjoy!

Bote's Mixer Board outage

2009-07-22T00:49:00.003-04:00

Bote's Mixer Board serving up Fort Lauderdale area public safety shenanigans is down today and tomorrow because BellSouth DSL is a bunch of incompetent nincompoops.

Because my unreliable DSL line is so unreliable, I put in an order to move it to the other phone pair coming into my place. So they dutifully executed the disconnect order on the old circuit, but there is nothing whatsoever on the new line. No hiss, no battery, no dial tone, no nuttin.

They are rolling a truck tomorrow (Wednesday) between 8 and 4:30 so we shall see if they can get one damned pair of wires to connect between my place and their central office.

Sorry for the outage.

McLean Relay Station testing

2009-06-22T20:03:00.007-04:00

I have been testing the rejuvenated McLean Relay Station for the last few days, so far so good computer-wise. The scanner simply will not provide reliable reception here, whether on the tower-mounted antenna nor with the back-of-set antenna sitting in a window. This is still a Bermuda Triangle for RF, unfortunately.

The MRS was catapulted back into the spotlight with coverage of the horrific Metro train wreck in northeast D.C. this evening. It maxed out at 10 listeners for quite some time. I only wish the radio coverage were solid, but the voice frequently breaks up. If I can stick a better 800 MHz antenna on it I will, but that is doubtful.

I put a business-grade router on it, so it should work after I turn my back on it to return home. But with computers you never know.

My thoughts go out to those affected by this train wreck.

The systems that will normally be scanned on the McLean Relay Station include Arlington County fire, MWAA (Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority) fire, Fairfax County fire, and Fairfax County police district 3 (McLean, natch). Special events and incidents might require me to deviate from this list, such as this evening.

Enjoy.

FtL PD 72 hour test

2009-06-12T12:44:00.004-04:00

Fort Lauderdale police are performing an experiment for 72 hours starting at 06:00 this morning (Friday morning). They have eliminated the district 2 central dispatcher and have split the city into two halves, north and south. The dividing line is supposed to be Sunrise Blvd.

So if you hear 100, 200, and 300 series units mixing together, that might explain why.

Bote's Mixer Board more reliable--maybe?

2009-05-14T13:02:00.004-04:00

I can't make any promises--BUT--BellSouth.net promised me that my frequent intermittent outages will not recur.

It turns out that when I originally ordered my DSL service I asked for the top tier which, at the time, was 3 Megabits / second. I'm too far from the central office and the cable is so old and crappy that it can't handle that speed, so they backed me down to 1.5Mb service.

The trouble is that the downgraded setting just won't stick. They have a local database at my c.o. with the working profile and the master database up in Atlanta with the original unworkable profile settings. Periodically Atlanta's 800 pound gorilla of a database comes down here and stomps all over the good changes that the techs have made and I wind up back in DSL hell.

At least I know what to look for now, and so do you if you have similar symptoms: brief outages lasting just long enough to resynchronize with the DSLAM (60-90 seconds) typically during thunderstorms. It doesn't affect web pages so much, but streaming media such as your Vonage VoIP phone call or, ohhh say, Internet radio get disconnected. You can log into your DSL modem management screen to see what the downstream line speed is set to.

We shall see how long this latest repair lasts. In the meantime I can't wait for Uverse to roll into my 'hood.

UPDATE 2009.06.12

Nope, the DSL still goes out when the wind blows. I'll have to kick some BellSouth butt here.

Fleet Week in Likkerdale

2009-04-28T01:43:00.004-04:00

Fleet Week has arrived in Fort Lauderdale and so have the Navy vessels carrying their payloads of sailors drooling for shore leave.

I will determine the best talkgroups to open up to enjoy the festivities. They usually set up a cooperative "shuttle" service between the armed services and the police to get the soused mariners back to their vessels, so expect some interesting traffic from that.

Bote's Boca Box in transition

2009-04-13T02:43:00.003-04:00

Expect the unexpected with Bote's Boca Box.

The current home of the streaming computer might be in flux over coming weeks, so if it turns up missing then check back later--much later. It could be down for a day or down for a month, there's no telling right now.

But, if nothing happens, don't worry, be happy!

Spring Break mode over

2009-04-01T11:29:00.006-04:00

It's about time to wrap up my exclusive coverage of Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale.

I have locked out FtL police district 2 once again since the bar district downtown is back to normal and the common thugs in the wild, wild west of Fort Lauderdale are more trouble to listen to than they are worth.

Also, I will be opening up Broward County fire North and South dispatch channels, allowing us to hear all the fire calls that are handled by Broward's E.C.C..

Note that there are many jurisdictions that handle their own dispatching in Broward County, such as Pompano Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Coral Springs, Margate, Deerfield Beach, and on and on. Apparently they operate in isolation which has bitten them in the butt before. Don't get sick or injured in Broward County.

Stay tuned for another big announcement coming tomorrow.

Acoustic Research IR200 Feed Radio

2009-03-14T08:25:00.006-04:00

My new Acoustic Research Infinite Radio 200 works well on my feeds. It's not perfect, but I can let it stream my scanner audio while I use my laptop or desktop for real computing without the two purposes clashing with each other.

Pros:

Stand-alone, no computer needed to listen to streams
Saves 6 preset stations in buttons across the top
Excellent audio quality
Wired or WiFi connections
Versatile: receives live streams, audio files stored on mp3tunes or USB thumb drives, music from Slacker, AM and FM radio

Cons:

Displays channel tags as soon as the scanner sends them, but the audio is still delayed by about 2 minutes, so the tags make no sense
Even the latest firmware is a little clunky
Some menus are not as helpful as they might be

RCA/Acoustic Research/Audiovox seem to be working on improving the operation of this tabletop Internet radio so I am confident that these and other complaints will be addressed.

So if you want a neat way to listen to my feeds and the thousands of other Internet radio stations, this is a pretty cool way to listen to them.

Mixer Board tags, talkgroups trimmed

2009-03-02T21:57:00.007-05:00

I received my Acoustic Research Infinite Radio 200 today. Once I got it programmed, cycled the power to get it to do something useful, I found that it receives my streaming scanner feeds just fine. It has great audio, by the way.

It also shows the channel tags as the scanner receives them, rather than as they are played 60-120 seconds later out the radio's speaker. While there is nothing I can do about that, I can trim the length of the alpha tags so that they don't need scroll so much on the 18-character display screen.

Also, since this is Spring Break month here in Fort Lauderdale and the FtL cops have special details for Spring Breakers, I am locking out some of the chatty talkgroups that are not directly of interest. These include Broward Fire South and North dispatch talkgroups, which cover Davie, Hallandale, and other jurisdictions outside the area of focus for now. On the other hand, I have added Fort Lauderdale police district 2 which covers the popular downtown nightlife district along SW 2nd Street on either side of the FEC tracks. I will change things back next month after the dust settles.

It just keeps getting better and better, don't it?!

FtL Audio restored

2009-02-25T20:30:00.004-05:00

Sorry about the loss of audio this past week. The culprit was your brilliant system administrator who was on travel and turned off most electronics in the radio shack, including the mixer that feeds audio to the streaming computer. Hence, no audio for one week.

It's all better now, so tune in on those Acoustic Research ARIR200 Internet Radios. They have just come back in stock at both Amazon.com and at J&R so check 'em out. I just ordered mine from Amazon.com this morning and even though I chose the free shipping it is already listed in the "shipped" category, so I might have it by this time next week!

New life for the co-lo

2009-01-30T22:35:00.003-05:00

It seems that my feeds will be staying put at the Dallas co-location facility after all.

Unfortunately, they had a major fiber router failure today which is the cause of the occasional interruptions in the stream. Oh well, you get what you pay for, folks.

I have no e.t.r. on the D.C. area feed, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna head up there when it's 20 degrees Fahrenheit with ice and snow all over the place. No sir! It'll get repaired when it gets repaired.

That is all.

Dallas Shoutcast server going buh-bye

2009-01-04T15:17:00.006-05:00

Now I have been informed that the Shoutcast server that you hit to listen to the various streams will be moving out of the Dallas co-location facility by the end of January. No home for it has been located yet.

This also means that there is no point in me going to great lengths to get the McLean Relay Station back online only to have everything go away a couple weeks later. This is a hobby, after all.

I have an idea and my buddy Lu has an idea, so if he ever gets back from traveling he can try out his idea. In the meantime, I need to investigate my idea to see how it goes.

If Lu's idea works, then your bookmarks should stay the same. Any other way will require a change to the address for the streams.

So when the colostreaming.com does not respond on any known port, you will know that dark day has come. I will update here as we make progress.

MRS down for the count

2008-12-15T18:55:00.005-05:00

OK, that's it. I submit. D-Link and Linksys tie for worst piece of shit in consumer-grade networking junk.

Junk 2, Me 0.

After my brother-in-law spent wayyyyyy more time than should be required of an innocent bystander trying to get the HP laptop with D-Link WiFi card to associate with the p.o.s. Linksys WRT54G, we realized that the Linksys had decided to restore its factory defaults simply because it lost power.

Gee, that's nice! Thanks for that. I guess all those settings that I wasted time entering really weren't that important to save, after all. Enough time wasted coaxing this garbage to do what it is supposed to do.

So the McLean Relay Station, after a mere week online, will remain offline until I can grab the pile of junk that comprises it and haul it upstairs, plug it directly in to the offending Linksys, and give it a reliable hardwired Internet connection. 802.11 was simply not meant to be at that house. Then we shall see what else can break in my absence.

Depending on how things go, I will likely procure another router that is not a big piece of shit and replace the Linksys altogether. End of Linksys problems.

I doubt that it will be restored to service before the Presidential Inauguration. It is just a hobby for me, after all. And 1100 miles away.

Bote's Mixer Board channel tags

2008-12-11T03:56:00.005-05:00

Bote's Mixer Board in Fort Lauderdale now offers channel tags to serve you better.

The scanner is a BC 780 and undoubtedly it must report the control channel to Gordon's wonderful channel tagging utility known as Talkgroup Monitor. So you will see a lot of nonsense in between transmissions. But, at least you will see the source of what you are currently hearing. It is formatted to show the channel tag in the Title field of the data stream. WinAmp typically displays this before (to the left of) the name of the stream.

As mentioned previously, these channel tags are famously viewable in WinAmp (recommended), VLC, iTunes, and Windows Media Player. Give it a try.

MRS: Murphy's Law strikes agan

2008-12-09T13:56:00.006-05:00

Of course everything at the newly re-installed McLean Relay Station worked swimmingly while I was in town for over a week. Now that I am 1000 miles away back in sunny south Florida the UPS feeding the router and the server at the site decided to crap out, at least that's the problem based on initial reports.

Once repairs have been effected I will make the necessary tests and report back here that the feed is once again online.

***
UPDATE 17:49
So the APC UPS failed and has been removed from the system pending replacement.

The p.o.s. D-Link air card shoved into the laptop that rebooted just fine every single time I was there has decided that it now does not want to find the access point without a kick in the ass, and my father is ill-equipped to be putzing around with a laptop to get it back online.

So the damned thing stays offline until I can get somebody over there to make the laptop pretty-please find the access point, then it will automagically start streaming again.

And yet again I learn the lesson: don't use consumer-grade junk to do a professional job.

McLean Relay Station online

2008-12-07T19:47:00.004-05:00

Sorry about that, Chief. The power has been restored to the scanner on the McLean Relay Station.

Now you will actually hear radio traffic once again.

McLean Relay Station up full time

2008-12-01T23:35:00.006-05:00

Bote's McLean Relay Station is up full time with channel tags to serve you better. Please avail yourself of the links on the left. They most likely will bring up the Shoutcast server status page if you just click on them.

If you want to listen outright, just copy the link contents and paste into your favorite player, including WinAmp (preferred), iTunes, VLC (VideoLAN), or Windows Media Player (no channel tags).

The systems monitored include (and are usually limited to):

0 - The Federal District of Columbia fire trunked radio system
1 - Arlington County, Virginia public safety digital trunked system, fire
(1) - Arlington County, Virginia public safety analog trunked system (catch all)
3 - MWAA (Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority) DCA and IAD trunked system, fire
4 - Fairfax County, Virginia public safety trunked system, fire
7 - Montgomery County, Maryland public safety trunked system, fire

At my option I might open up or deactivate certain groups as needed since I have remote control capability of this scanner. With the upcoming presidential inauguration fun and games I'm sure this capability will come in very handy. :-)

Because this feed monitors several trunked systems that employ duplicate talkgroup ids you might see DC fire on the channel tags when MWAA fire is talking. That's the way it goes. If you refer to the Council of Governments handy-dandy numbering chart above you can tell who you are hearing: the jurisdiction numbers are prefixed onto the unit numbers, so engine 705 is former Kensington (Montgomery) engine 5-1 and tower 401 is former McLean (Fairfax County) tower 1. Also, the damned channel tags don't seem to keep up when the scanner is rapidly stopping on different channels so you can't always believe what you read on the Internet.

More will be posted here as warranted.