Comcast Murders Broward Feeds

UPDATE: As of 11:05 Comcast is back up, but it keeps going out for a few minutes at a time. I guess they're disconnecting network nodes along the line back to their head-end. Expect brief outages the rest of the day.

Comcast promised their Xfinity cable internet service would go down for an extended period of time in order to allow them to "upgrade" their network to whatever 10G means this week. I guess today is the day because there's a truck with a ladder up to a utility pole and no bits are flying across my cable modem.

When it comes back, all the Broward feeds will come back:

Bote's Mixer Board

Bote's Wild Feed

Bote's F.E.C. Oakland Park feed

Bote's CSX/SFRTA Oakland Park feed

Good thing I'm building a system locally on my bench LAN today and that still works just peachy keen!

Comcast Up and Down

UPDATE 2021.04.07:  Comcast has been stable for the better part of 24 hours so I'll declare things up and running again. Now the trouble is that I have a new public i.p. address, so I have to update that address in the other end of my point-to-point VPN links, which is not going well.

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Comcrap has been up and down all morning (mostly down) so the Broward area feeds have followed suit. 

 I'm not declaring that things are back up until at least tomorrow. Comcast's app first said it would be repaired by 3PM, then when I checked an hour later it said by 4PM. Extending the promised repair time is their oldest trick in the book.

Just be patient. You be patient, sir, or you won't get anything.

CUTOVER

Please refresh your DNS or restart your player to pick up the new DNS entry pointing to listen.trackstreamer.com (which is the same as listen.botecomm.com now).

It might be a little bumpy the nexty day or two, but it should even out once I get everything settled down. I'm trying something that might not work.

UPDATE 1: 2020.05.15 11:35 EDT - Well, that didn't work. Still more configurururing to figure out. Computers, huh?

UPDATE 2: 2020.05.16 10:17 - So far, so good. Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

Comcast Repaired--I Think

A Comcast technician has just replaced the drop from the pole to my house and even went the extra mile to replace the connectors going to the splitter with my neighbor and the lightning arrestor. There was a gash in the old drop cable that could have been introducing problems, so we shall see.

Only time will tell whether the intermittent outages that lasted 2-5 minutes at a time are finally a thing of the past on the Broward feeds. This includes the Mixer Board, Wild Feed, and F.E.C. Fort Lauderdale feeds.

Moved to Listen.TrackStreamer.com

All feeds have been migrated to listen.trackstreamer.com for those listening on WinAmp or other media player. The port number and mount points remain the same, only the domain name changed.

I updated the HTML5 players on my personal web page describing the streams in detail, so they work once again.

I have no idea if or when TuneIn radio will bother themselves to update my streams on their platform with the new information that I sent them. If past experience is any guide, don't hold your breath.

Moving to Listen.Trackstreamer.com

I'm pointing my feeds to a different feed server at
http://listen.trackstreamer.com:8000

This means that any sites that glom off my colostreaming.com feeds will go silent after the cutover. This includes TuneIn Radio, which could never seem to get my feed detail listings correct.

You can either plug the new links into your WinAmp player or if you don't care about the channel tags or features of a real player you can listen to the HTML5 players on my personal web site (see the pane to the right under Listen).

The "Web Players and Details" page on my site has HTML5 players embedded in it that kind of work, plus detailed info on each feed that doesn't change often.

I'll post here when the cutover happens.

Comcast Outage

Comcast Xfinity cable Internet went down about 10:30 this morning. Service was restored about 15:40 so all feeds are back up.

Now it's down to seeing if this intermittent outage during the heat of the day continues.

Bote's Mixer Board Now Live

Due to popular demand, Bote's Mixer Board has been returned to service.

Right now it has Fort Lauderdale fire and also police District 1. This keeps things manageable.

Even though it's no longer fed by my mixer board, it sometimes has other stuff on.

The direct listen link to feed into WinAmp or other player is

http://colostreaming.com:8000/botemixer

You can also find it on TuneIn Radio by name, but they shove ads in it.

Broward Feed Computer Down

The little Dell shoebox computer that sends out the streams for Bote's Mixer Board with Fort Lauderdale fire and Bote's Wild Feed which carries Broward County fire and B.S.O. Oakland Park has not worked properly since the latest Windows Update.

So both Broward County feeds are down for now until I can rebuild that system.

Watch this blog for updates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Miami Dolphin's 2011 Cycling Challenge

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

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.

Planned outage

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.

Fort Lauderdale rebanded

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.

Pompano Beach fire moves to Wild Feed

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.

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.