2010-08-29

Storms causing DSL outages

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!

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.

2010-08-25

Key West power outage

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.

2010-08-15

Back online

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.

2010-08-08

Bad storms approaching

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.

2010-08-01

Service interruption for Broward feeds

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.