Mixer Board BOLO announcements

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

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

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

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

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.