2011-06-18

Key West swim race

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

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.

2011-06-12

Key West audio GREATLY improved

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.