SMART Ride in the Keys

This weekend, 16 and 17 November, 2012 marks the SMART bicycle ride from Miami down to Key West both of those days.

Click the link above for full details and listen to Bote's Southernmost Feed for the police details and inevitable fire-rescue responses to assist riders and so forth.

As we approach Thanksgiving it is evident that The Season is quickly arriving. Traffic is increasing on south Florida streets, along with the stupidity level of drivers. It only gets busier from here.

Come on Memorial Day!!

Super Boat Races 2012

Super Boat International brings its 2012 race schedule to Key West this week.

Last year 3 participants died in boat wrecks, so it's worth listening both to the marine channels and the fire+rescue traffic to catch all the action.

I've opened up all the marine channels on Bote's Southernmost Feed and increased the delay time to 4 seconds so that we're more likely to hear replies on the marine channels.

Dolphin Cycling Challenge This Weekend

Link to official Dolphin Cycling Challenge event web site.

This weekend, November 3 and 4, 2012, sees the Dolphin Cycling Challenge ride through Broward County. It's actually a tri-county event with rides starting in Dade County at Joe Robbie/Pro Player/Dolphins/Dolphin/Land Shark/Sun Life/Trainwreck Stadium and City Place in West Palm Beach. Shorter rides start in downtown Fort Lauderdale at Huizenga Park and run along I-595 or State Road 84, I can't tell which from the maps.

The largest impact will be the bicyclists along A1A through Fort Lauderdale which is still being cleaned up from the passage of Hurricane Sandy. The wind-whipped ocean washed tons of sand onto Atlantic Blvd which the city public works crews shoved into giant temporary dunes to block further intrusion. This left A1A impassable during the annual Boat Show and 1 narrow lane was opened southbound only yesterday. I assume that vehicular traffic will be totally blocked to allow the bicyclists to use the one or two available lanes that are not swamped with sand.

I will likely open up Bote's Mixer Board to the police special event talkgroups used to coordinate this bike ride so you will hear more than just the usual fire radio traffic.

FtL Boat Show 2012

Thanks to gusty winds from Hurricane Sandy offshore, the 2012 Fort Lauderdale Boat Show is giving fits to police and fire units out on the beach. The strong northeast winds Thursday and Friday blew sand and water onto A1A also known as Atlantic Blvd and Seabreeze Blvd. I have opened up Bote's Mixer Board to include the police district 1 main and bravo talkgroups. Also, fire tac D is opened up to hear the boat show detail traffic. As usual Bote's Wild Feed has the usual lineup including all 3 Ft Lauderdale police districts which overlap some of the traffic on the Mixer Board. Enjoy.

Operation UNITAS 2012

Boca Chica Naval Base has been preparing for Operation Unitas, an annual maritime training exercise to improve responses in drug interdiction, piracy, human smuggling, humanitarian response and possible battles in the Atlantic and Carribean. A multi-national naval fleet was ported in Key West during the first day of UNITAS 2012, a two-week joint maritime training exercise bringing together ships and crews from Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, United Kingdom and the U.S.
They will depart Tuesday for a planned exercise off Playa Giron, just West of the Guantanamo Naval base in Cuba.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/22/3015832/navies-from-around-the-hemisphere.html
My Key West feed will not have anything particular to this operation, just the usual fire talkgroups. But if something new appears we will hear it since the scanner is set to search the NQX trunked system so you never know what you might hear.

ATnT and Their Crappy Network

Here we go again! The AT&T serving my DSL is acting all kinds of screwy again, not 2 weeks after they found a core router in trouble deep in their internal network. No e.t.r. but Comcast can't come fast enough!

I'll update this post when the Mixer Board and Wild feeds are normal again. I'm just going to shut down the feed computer since it does no good to have it keep hammering the Icecast server to no avail.

GoDaddy Name Server Outage

GoDaddy is having trouble with their domain name servers (DNS) this afternoon. Since colostreaming.com is registered with them that would explain why I can't hit the scanner Icecast server.

Keep hitting it every so often, when it comes back it will start to work again. Nothing anybody can do about this but GoDaddy. Since their own sales web site is affected by this I'm quite confident they are putting maximum effort into solving it.

In the meantime, if you want to bypass DNS just point your stream player to
208.67.255.115
in place of colostreaming.com

For example, my Key West feed is at
208.67.255.115:8000/botekyw

tack on the name for the other feeds as necessary.

Broward Feeds Screwy

UPDATE: Thanks to Lu being proactive AT&T discovered a problem with a core router in their internal network that was affecting a number of customers. Like throwing a switch Monday afternoon packets started flowing "normally" again. Both Broward County feeds have resumed service until the next AT&T routing debacle.

Due to technical problems well beyond my control, any feed originating over my super-crappy AT&T DSL link at my house in Fort Lauderdale is basically useless. It's an uplink bandwidth or routing problem so the Icecast server gets starved of packets and keeps repeating the introductory announcement or gives you a few brief syllables of traffic then goes to the "feed down" music. I have shut down the feed computer to save some juice since it's not doing much useful anyway.

Sorry about that, chief, but unfortunately the best solution is weeks away under my current schedule. This is a hobby for me so I do the best I can, but work and other commitments take precedence. I never thought I'd say this, but Comcast will solve this and many other problems around here as soon as I can schedule an installation.

Key West feed power failure

UPDATE: Thanks to my good friend Lu, the Key West scanner feed is back online and running just in time for Hurricane Isaac to knock out power to the Keys and put it offline again. :-)

The Rinky Dinky Power Company that supplies Key West lost electricity in the wee hours yesterday morning just long enough for the battery in my U.P.S. to drain to useless. I'll see what I can do about getting somebody to flick the switch on the feed computer to get it running again.

Mixer Board craziness repaired

My client computer that sends the Mixer Board and Wild Feed streams up to the server went crazy, probably due to the recent power glitches we've had from the thunderstorms. The u.p.s. can do only so much.

After restarting the server process thinking it was bonkers and not seeing any improvement, I rebooted the little Dell GX shoebox feed computer and all is well now. I guess I should have started with that fix, but live and learn.

You may now resume listening to all the gripping fire action from beautiful downtown Fort Lauderdale.

Key West feed down

UPDATE: 18:43 - thanks to a very dexterous friend the Key West feed is back up! It requires one hand to hold the laptop, another hand to open the lid, and a third hand to slide back in the confined space to flip the power slider to boot it up. All better now!

A storm has knocked out power to Key West and the UPS battery has been exhausted. So the Key West feed is 10-7 until I can arrange to turn it back on. No estimated time to repair, I'll post here when it's back up, or you can try hitting to see if you get speech or music.

Strong winds blow down power lines

Florida Plunder & Loot is busier than a one-eyed cat at a fish fry with these winds blowing down power lines left and right. Some of these strands arc on the grass or in trees and palm fronds causing brush fires, so Broward County and Fort Lauderdale fire have been busy, as well. The scanner is a-hoppin!

These winds are the southernmost tail of Tropical Storm Debby, who did not do Dallas this time. We got some needed rain the past few days, but today it's all wind. It's the folks upstate and in southern Georgia who are being deluged with rain. I don't know if that's a blessing or a curse seeing how that area suffered from a pretty bad drought the last couple years. They probably didn't need it dumped on them all at once, though.

Service interruptions

The co-location host claims that they have been doing some upgrades to the machine hosting my streams. That is the reason for the numerous outages today, in addition to effects from one of their peer ISP going out completely for a couple hours this morning.

The weird part is that today they said they were converting my server over to the same ESXi virtual platform to which they said they moved me back in November. Verrrrrrrrrrrry interesting, but stoooopid.

Hopefully, things will stabilize soon. If not, just check back every hour or so to see if the stream is back online.

Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show

SUNDAY UPDATE: CANCELLED. It's soggy. Flood watch in effect until Monday night. My windows are thankful, since they won't be shaken apart by low flying fighter jets all day.

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It's back. The Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show is a noisy spectacle of fighter jets and assault vessels and tactics and it's on through this weekend.

I have set up a scanner on Bote's Mobile Feed (because I can) focused on the Fort Lauderdale trunked system. Since Bote's Mixer Board already carries Ft. Lauderdale fire traffic I will be tweaking what fire talkgroups are carried on the Mobile Feed, so expect fire to change.

The police traffic will typically be heard on their Special Event talkgroups 4A and 4B, but since the show is held on the beach in District 1 you will hear those cops dealing with problems associated with the air show. I have locked out the wild, wild west on District 2, so you will only hear Districts 1, 3, and 4, plus whatever other special event traffic trickles through.

I will not be carrying any aircraft communications as my setup here is inadequate to that task.

Bote's Mobile Feed

Above.net Routing trouble

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.