Weather Tweeps

 A list of good accounts to follow on Twitter for reliable information about South Florida weather and tropical systems in the Atlantic.

Scientists at NHC and Other Tropical Researchers

@NHC_Atlantic - official National Hurricane Center account

@NHC_TAFB

@AndrewHagen

@philklotzbach

@TropicalTidbits

@BMcNoldy

@EricBlake12

Hurricane Hunters (actually fly the planes into hurricanes)

@TheAstroNick

@JeremyDeHart53d

Weather Forecasters

@NWSMiami

@NWSTampaBay

@NWSKeyWest

@NWSCPC

@JohnMoralesTV

@lukedorrisWPLG

@FloridaStorms

@SammyHadiWx

Automated Accounts

@iembot_mfl

New Marine Feed, Broward CAD Down

It looks like Broward fire is no longer transmitting their USDD Computer-Aided Dispatch calls over a talkgroup on the old Project 16 trunked system, so I abandoned that and lit up a new VHF marine feed on Broadcastify.

I'm looking for a host in a tall condo near the beach to host the thing for better coverage. For now it's about 3 miles from the ocean and can hear vessels calling Oakland Park and Sunrise bridge tenders, but not the bridges themselves since they transmit at very low power.

 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/34989

Enjoy!

F.E.C. Ry Fort Lauderdale feed testing

I am testing a feed of Florida East Coast Railway radio communications around Fort Lauderdale. The current range is limited by a poor antenna system, but the coverage will improve. For now there is a good amount of activity locally from the construction foremen overseeing the upgrades for All Aboard Florida / Brightline passenger service.

Since F.E.C. Railway does not call signals you will only hear traffic when the dispatcher calls a train or a train asks for permission through a particular work authority. A.A.F. work authorities are fairly busy during the morning and early afternoon hours while the regular freight traffic generally is more active in the evening and especially the earlier mornings when 3 southbounds cruise through Lauderdale while the Boca local and Port Everglades switcher try to get their work done in the mix.

Feed details are found on Bote's Streaming Audio page.

A1A Marathon 2013

Fort Lauderdale hosts the A1A Marathon Sunday morning 17 February, 2013. EMS detail units are using fire channel D which is their special events talkgroup. Listen to the Mixer Board feed for all the gripping action. As of 06:30 they are already underway and scheduled to be finished by about 08:00 or so.

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.

FtL Marathon and SuperBoat Races

Busy Sunday today: Fort Lauderdale is hosting a 13.1 KM half-marathon that begins at 06:13 from in front of the Arts Institute down on SE 17th Street Causeway. Police operations are on Special Event 1 / 4A which is talkgroup 29968 decimal. I'll probably set up my Mobile Feed to stream the special event talkgroup for your listening humor.

Meanwhile, down in Key West will be the final race day for the cigarette boats participating in the SuperBoat races. Let's hope nobody dies today. I'll adjust my Southernmost Feed to weed out the other traffic and focus on Key West.

Enjoy!

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.

Winterfest Boat Parade

Fort Lauderdale hosts the annual Winterfest Boat Parade of Lights this evening starting at 18:30 E.S.T. It's a pretty big deal with viewers lining the shore of the IntraCoastal Waterway from Lauderdale up to Pompano Beach.

I have restricted Bote's Wild Feed to SEARCH on the Fort Lauderdale trunked system in case any new talkgroups pop up. You will hear traffic that is not normally heard on that feed for the duration of this special event.

Spring Break cops in Ft Lauderdale

Bote's Wild Feed will be streaming Fort Lauderdale police scanner action for the remainder of March in honor of all the bullet-heads who come down for Spring Break madness.

I should have done this sooner since we are yet 2 weeks into Spring Break, but there's only one of me to go around.

I'll post here when the Wild Feed switches back to Broward County's gripping fire radio action.

Super Bowl Saturday Night Party

Fort Lauderdale is hosting a shindig on the beach to celebrate Super Bowl 2010 in Miami.

Bote's Mixer Board has the usual fire traffic, which includes the Fort Lauderdale fire department's special events talkgroup tac D.

Bote's Wild Feed has police traffic focused on FtL police and Broward interoperability talkgroup 14D for traffic control during the event and to escort the favored few into and out of the party area.

BSO interop 14i is also active with event traffic. There are likely others, so listen up.

Fort Lauderdale boat parade feed

Fort Lauderdale's annual Boat Parade of Lights down the New River and up the Intracoastal Waterway shoves off at 18:00 tonight, Saturday, 12 December, 2009.

I have set up this special secondary feed off my mixer board to stream public safety and support traffic related to the boat parade from the FtL trunked sytem. Sometimes it can be quite entertaining.

Listen to the feed in WinAmp, VLC, iTunes, Windows Media Player, and probably others. It is an mp3 stream at 16kbps so it should not burden your dial-up or mobile link too much.

The listen link is:
http://colostreaming.com:8000/botemixer2.m3u

If clicking doesn't tell your computer to do the Right Thing, then copy and paste the link into your player--that always works.

Bote's Mixer Board online

Bote's Mixer Board is back online on the new DSL circuit.

We shall see how long it takes until *THIS* one fails. I see some thunderboomies on the RADAR advancing into Georgia so we might know within 24 hours or so.

Enjoy!

Bote's Mixer Board outage

Bote's Mixer Board serving up Fort Lauderdale area public safety shenanigans is down today and tomorrow because BellSouth DSL is a bunch of incompetent nincompoops.

Because my unreliable DSL line is so unreliable, I put in an order to move it to the other phone pair coming into my place. So they dutifully executed the disconnect order on the old circuit, but there is nothing whatsoever on the new line. No hiss, no battery, no dial tone, no nuttin.

They are rolling a truck tomorrow (Wednesday) between 8 and 4:30 so we shall see if they can get one damned pair of wires to connect between my place and their central office.

Sorry for the outage.

FtL PD 72 hour test

Fort Lauderdale police are performing an experiment for 72 hours starting at 06:00 this morning (Friday morning). They have eliminated the district 2 central dispatcher and have split the city into two halves, north and south. The dividing line is supposed to be Sunrise Blvd.

So if you hear 100, 200, and 300 series units mixing together, that might explain why.

Fleet Week in Likkerdale

Fleet Week has arrived in Fort Lauderdale and so have the Navy vessels carrying their payloads of sailors drooling for shore leave.

I will determine the best talkgroups to open up to enjoy the festivities. They usually set up a cooperative "shuttle" service between the armed services and the police to get the soused mariners back to their vessels, so expect some interesting traffic from that.

Spring Break mode over

It's about time to wrap up my exclusive coverage of Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale.

I have locked out FtL police district 2 once again since the bar district downtown is back to normal and the common thugs in the wild, wild west of Fort Lauderdale are more trouble to listen to than they are worth.

Also, I will be opening up Broward County fire North and South dispatch channels, allowing us to hear all the fire calls that are handled by Broward's E.C.C..

Note that there are many jurisdictions that handle their own dispatching in Broward County, such as Pompano Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Coral Springs, Margate, Deerfield Beach, and on and on. Apparently they operate in isolation which has bitten them in the butt before. Don't get sick or injured in Broward County.

Stay tuned for another big announcement coming tomorrow.

Bote's Mixer Board channel tags

Bote's Mixer Board in Fort Lauderdale now offers channel tags to serve you better.

The scanner is a BC 780 and undoubtedly it must report the control channel to Gordon's wonderful channel tagging utility known as Talkgroup Monitor. So you will see a lot of nonsense in between transmissions. But, at least you will see the source of what you are currently hearing. It is formatted to show the channel tag in the Title field of the data stream. WinAmp typically displays this before (to the left of) the name of the stream.

As mentioned previously, these channel tags are famously viewable in WinAmp (recommended), VLC, iTunes, and Windows Media Player. Give it a try.

FTL stream audio restored

I could not figure out where the audio was disappearing from the Fort Lauderdale stream, but it magically came back while I was juggling cables around. Then I could not get it to fail.

Don't argue with success, right?

I have no idea how long it was down because I listen to the scanner locally here, not the feed. I wish someone had alerted me. It never gets THAT quiet on the scanner here. :-)

Bote's Mixer Board back online

DOH! I killed all systems here as Fort Lauderdale was rocked mightily by a nasty thunderstorm the other day. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on the streaming machine after things settled down.

Sorry about that, Chief!